


Monster Logic: Folio One

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Preseries, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 09:51:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s a monster,” Sam says, softly, at the same time that Dean says, “That’s the thing that took our father.”</p><p>When Deirdre Mosby and her bizarre gang pick up two bloody boys on the road to Savannah, she figures -- whatever, just leave her to sulk in the back seat. It's just another errand for her strange employers. But Sam and Dean Winchester are not alone. They've got a giant, six-winged monster tagging along with them. And seriously, even she knows that two boys and a monster are a sure recipe for trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monster Logic: Folio One

**Author's Note:**

> Art masterpost [here!](http://soserendipity.livejournal.com/13787.html)
> 
> beta by dear_tiger and supernarttu
> 
> Notes are [here](http://indiachick.livejournal.com/18080.html)

 

****

**Title: MONSTER LOGIC: FOLIO ONE**

**_Now_ **

Shiny Georgia night, wet and still, and the headlamps of the rattletrap car gleam off raindrops and slick roads,  mile-markers and the occasional late-night traveler.

Deirdre Mosby sleeps at the back of the Oldsmobile: an uneasy, bedraggled sleep that nuzzles and rips itself at the edges of wakefulness. Dozing and waking, waking and dozing, and each time she opens her eyes it’s been the same scenery since Jacksonville: night-shrouded houses and farms, roads haunted with shadows of cypress trees, swaying saw-palmetto and glittering rain and the back of Sparrow’s head, his white hair a sharp contrast to the ink-flower halo of Dog’s.

Sparrow smokes and smokes, filling the car with grey-white fog. Deirdre snaps at him, but he only turns around and grins at her with his metal teeth and bright orange eyes and Deirdre looks away, shuddering, hugging Ghost’s cage closer to herself. Within it, the rat runs in endless circles and peers at her with terror-struck red eyes.

“Where are we going?” she asks, bored of sleeping now, bored and tired, and she wants to ruin something. Someone.

“The Ladies told us to pick up someone,” Sparrow says, turning around and blowing smoke in Deirdre’s face. She coughs and yanks at his hair, uproots a few strands of silky white, and he yelps, wriggling away from her.

“Where we gonna find them?”

“The Ladies said we’ll know them when we see them.”

“I hope it isn’t one of those changeling kids. They smell like earth and rot,” Deirdre says, looking at the empty seat next to her with her nose wrinkled, like a rabbit. “And they all got those weird teeth. Like you, Sparrow. You a changeling?”

“God, I wish,” Sparrow laughs, throwing out the cigarette and sucking on licorice instead. “You could be one too. I don’t see any pearly whites in _your_ mouth.”

Deirdre scowls. “I ain’t no changeling. I ain’t anything.”

“’Cept a dead-person,” giggles Sparrow, and draws a smiley face on the fogged-up window. “Cold and drowned and pissed. River-water for brains. Crabs in your intestines.”

Deirdre snarls under her breath but stops when Dog presses foot to brake. The brakes squeal and the Oldsmobile goes off the road, listing hard to the left as its tires spit mud and gravel and crushed blades of grass. Deirdre lurches forward, slamming her forehead against the back of Sparrow’s seat, and Ghost’s cage goes tumbling out of her hand and into the dark space beneath the seats. She sees his eyes in the dark, like tiny red-dwarf stars.

The car comes to rest in a storm of dust and carbon monoxide, and Deirdre pushes her dripping hair away from her face.

“Jesus _fucking Christ,”_ she hisses, and has a split-second, elaborate day-dream of garroting both Sparrow and Dog, garroting them with piano-wire and burying their heads in wormy soil and throwing the rest of them to her sisters at the bottom of the Pawtuxet river, so far from here. _Have a prezzie, ladies. Meat: species unknown._

She sits up and peers through the wet windshield, and then she groans.

“They’re _humans,”_ she says, disbelievingly. “The Ladies want us to pick up _humans?”_

“Aw, but aren’t they _cute?”_ says Sparrow, brightly, ravenous eye-shine and all. “I want Disneyland!”

The two boys are blood-drenched and rain-soaked, and the rattletrap car’s weak headlights illuminate one in a red-streaked blue Disneyland T-shirt with wrap-around sunglasses that hides his eyes. The other is in a leather jacket and boots with a gun in his hand, and his eyes are a bloodshot green. That’s the older one, she can tell. And the other one, the younger one with the mole by the side of his nose and wild, floppy hair: that’s the one with the shadow that doesn’t match. Deirdre looks and looks at his shadow but can’t figure out what shape it’s supposed to be.

“Could you cut the lights, please?” she hears the younger one ask, and he’s shielding his eyes from the glare even with the sunglasses on. She tastes Kansas in his accent but it’s distorted; it’s like saying only the Pawtuxet drips from her when she’s been all over.

Dog cuts the lights and Deirdre hears Sparrow’s door open. _Don’t,_ she wants to tell him. There’s a cold cube of misgiving in the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t like the way darkness pools around the boys, as if maybe more than two pairs of eyes are watching her through them.

“What’d ya kill?” Sparrow asks, laughing.

“Coupla monsters,” says the older one, and Deirdre can hear the wariness in his voice. He’s very good at hiding it, grinning harsh at Sparrow, cocky bravado laid down pat with the ease of a pro, but he’s got a hand on Disneyland’s shoulder, and his jaw is tight.

“Buried?”

“Salted and burned, but not before the sons of bitches bled all over us.”

“Ha!” says Sparrow, glittery-ghost Sparrow, and grins. “Where ya headed? I’m Sparrow, like the bird.”

“Savannah,” says the boy, because he’s still only a boy. Can’t be older than twenty. “I’m Dean. This is my brother, Sam.”

“Holy Crow! We’re headed right there, would you _believe_ it?” Sparrow says, brightly, like he’s announcing that the boys have just won a toaster. “You can ride in the back with Deirdre, but try not to drip on the upholstery. Dog _loves_ this car.”

“ _She’s_ dripping,” Sam points out, shrugging thin shoulders.

“She’s always dripping. She can’t help it,” winks Sparrow. “Use the other door. Deirdre won’t move her ass from her pool. It’s her portable, homegrown little puddle.”

“Fuck you,” mutters Deirdre under her breath as the younger boy says “Thanks,” in a voice that’s anything but thankful, grabs his duffel and starts to the other side of the car. Dean doesn’t move, instead staring at the pool of pinkish water in which he’s still standing. Staring up at the bruised-looking sky, peppered with the twisted spider-legs of lightning, and then down the disappearing highway road.  Sam slides in next to Deirdre and rubs absently at a fresh dark smear on the knee of his jeans.

He looks up and says, “ _Dean,”_ and the older one shakes his head, quickly picks up his duffel and joins Sam.

Deirdre glares at them both.

“Don’t touch me,” she hisses.

“I’m not,” mutters Sam, taking off his sunglasses and peering at her with eyes a startling pink.

“Well, don’t. Don’t, like, bump against me or anything.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it. Not even once. I’ll scratch out your rabbit eyes.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Are you always such a wet blanket?”

Deirdre growls at Sparrow and the _‘get it? wet blanket?’_ expression he has on his face when he turns to look at them.

Dog starts the car, and the tires spin uselessly for a minute before the Oldsmobile finds traction. Deirdre is knocked back into her seat as the car climbs back onto blacktop and lurches into the dark.

“Winchester, right?” Sparrow asks. Streetlights paint strips of gold on his face and his metal teeth shine.

“Yeah,” says Dean Winchester, a dazed, zombie-like expression on his face. He doesn’t ask how Sparrow knows.

Sam gazes at him anxiously. “Can you get us there quick?”

“We’ll be in Savannah in a few hours,” Sparrow announces, genially.

“What’s wrong with him?” Deirdre asks, reaching across Sam to jab at Dean.

Sam slaps at her hand. “He was bitten. Stop doing that!”

Deirdre scratches him, just for good measure, and then looks out of the window, letting the air stream through her perennially wet hair, watching slash-pine shadows flit by in a stream of black. She looks behind the car, at the road they’d just taken, the cattail-choked vegetation somewhere within which these two boys had buried the monsters.

For a second she sees something else. Lit by the moon, something _giant_ , something so tall and so impossibly awful that fear splinters even her undead heart. Amber eyes burn in its dark face, and its six tattered wings drips tar-like ectoplasm. It stands there, raising a haze of heat about it; an awful, primeval something that, Deirdre is sure, did _not_ come from the womb of this planet.

She rips her gaze away and falls back in her seat gasping, spluttering, water pouring down her throat.

“What the _fuck_ is that?”

The boys look at each other, and Deirdre looks at the boys. Crescents of shadows beneath Dean’s eyes, and his lips are tight, white with worry or maybe blood-loss. Sam, childish tenderness still at the corners of his mouth, unnatural eyes downcast.

“It’s a monster,” Sam says, softly, at the same time that Dean says, “That’s the thing that took our father.”

 

**_Ten Days Ago_ **

**PART ONE**

 

After Roxboro and the things that happened there, Sam hitched all the way to Charlotte—catching rides with truckers and salesmen, hiding from the blazing sun that burned his eyes, wishing away fear and loneliness and confusion. It got worse after Charlotte, with drivers avoiding him like he was possibly contagious, and so Sam walked most of the way, and now twilight is creeping along the North Carolina highway as he stops.

It rained all day yesterday and the roads are wet, the highway a stream of ink, and there’s still a sun like melting butter but it’s sinking fast and dark things will soon come out to play. A little way off and just past the railway tracks is a store, tangled in a patch of kudzu vines and strangled with flyers for Southern Pride barbecue shacks. The faded sky blue sign on its side proclaims it a hunting’n’fishing store and that’s exactly what it looks like: just a store, half-shrouded in fog.

_Terrible things sometimes hide out in plain sight. The things that aren’t afraid of anything: they don’t need to hide in the dark._

Doesn’t matter who said that. Could be Dad or Dean, or could be any one of those books that he’d read in the backseat of the Impala. What matters is that Sam knows appearances don’t matter, just as much as he knows not to go anywhere without a weapon, and to always secure the windows with salt.

Sam shifts his duffel bag from one shoulder to another and pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Looks back over his shoulder at the black road, dark pine branches hanging over it as if the trees could shift closer any second, shift closer and cut him off from a black car that’s never going to come. For a moment it seems that the trees really _are_ moving, indigo shadows sucking away the orange twilight, but then he realizes that it’s just the Monster.

It stands there, bruise-dark and tall, tall enough that it towers over the pines and he has to crane his neck to look at its face. The last of the light starts to fade, and he pulls off the sunglasses, watching the Monster with his lips in a tight line.

“You don’t start screaming now,” he says. “If you want me to do what we came for, you shut up and stay away.”

It growls; a sound that shakes the trees as if in earthquake. Pinecones cascade to the wet asphalt with a sound like breaking bones. A couple of Pepsi cans go rattling down the road, racing each other. _Don’t break your heads,_ thinks Sam, dizzily, and takes a few steps after them.

The Monster screams this time, shatteringly loud. Wind drags at Sam’s hair, at his clothes. Leaves spiral off the ground in vertiginous drifts and swirl madly towards the Monster. The heat from its six large wings melts the fog, and Sam can see rail tracks a few steps away, a crossing with a semaphore light blinking yellow. There’s a man coming towards him, a giant furry dog in tow. The dog’s ears perk up as the Monster continues to scream, and it stops moving.

Sam can see the owner now, tugging at the leash, saying “Come on, boy! Come on!” The dog’s claws dig into the gravel, dislodging stones as it fights against its master, and then the leash is breaking and it’s running off into the night, yelping.

“Hey!” the owner cries out, throwing a puzzled look at Sam and the empty twilight roiling behind him, and then he takes off after the dog.

Sam turns around. He shields his eyes from the garish kaleidoscopic glow of the Monster’s face and yells over the noise.

“For something so big, you’re momentously stupid, aren’t you?”

And then he turns away from it and stalks down the highway, closer to the store.

“I’m hungry,” he tells it, feeling its ruby glare on the back of his neck. “And I’m not killing anything till I eat.”

He starts walking, stopping once over the rail tracks to look in either direction at the railroad. Fog rolls in again, milky and thick, and Sam clenches his fists against the sudden biting cold.

What would happen if he turned here right now, walked down those tracks and into the fog?

He shifts the duffel again, feels the weight of the Book of Names amongst a jumble of old T-shirts and jeans.

Open the Book to the middle, and the picture you’ll see is of this road. The store, and the blue trailer behind it, the lake beside. The next thing on the Monster’s hit-list lives here.

Since Roxboro, this has been the weight that Sam’s carrying around. This Book, this being, this mission.

_Keep walking._

The door to the store has a bell above the doorjamb and it clangs when Sam nearly stumbles through, bringing night air and the scent of pines with him, as well as a few shadows that sluice through the gaps and go skittering over the floor.

“How ya doin’, sport?” the old man at the store asks, eyeing Sam: his wild hair, his weird sunglasses and dirty, grass-stained clothes. The light inside is fluorescent, bright and white, and Sam could scream with joy. He gapes at the shelves, skin buzzing, bursting with love for stacked cans and fishing tackles, for bottles of aspirin and Korean pin-up girls, for dust bunnies and _civilization._ He could hug this old man, oil-streaked overalls and all.

He’s walked too damn long, and most of it in the dark.

“Police ain’t looking for you, is it?” the old man asks, and then a wide grin splits his face. “Don’t worry. I get plenty of runaways in here, ‘tis the season. Fall’s almost here, can’t ya feel it?”

Sam can. There’s a softness to the cicada song out along the roads, a coolness in the air that suggests a green autumn. The sun goes dreaming gold over salt-white skies, and even with the barest sunlight burning his eyes, Sam knows that it’s not so hot as to still be summer.

“Do you have a bathroom that I can use?”

“If you got folks out there, boy, you’d best be going back to them. You’ll have a hard Christmas, otherwise.”

“We don’t have Christmases,” blurts Sam, before he can think twice. A rush of heat flames across his cheeks.

“Yeah? That’s a pity, that is. Who doesn’t have Christmas?” the old man shakes his head and jerks his thumb in the direction of the Pepsi cooler. “Lav’s over there.”

“Thanks,” Sam grabs the duffel and lugs it behind him all the way to the flaking red-painted door of the restroom, grabbing some clothes from the bag before letting it fall with a thump on the ground in front of the Pepsi cooler. He jingles the change in his pocket and wonders if it’ll be enough for a Coke. It’s the last of his money, and unless he steals, he’s going to have to go at the things in the trailer back there on an empty stomach.

“You better goddamn flush the toilet, do you hear, boy?”

And it is to this that Sam Winchester shuts the door, fifteen and miserable and wondering what he’s going to find in the blue trailer back there. His heart pecks at his chest, hummingbird sharp, and he wishes that the old man would let him use the phone for free, so he could call Dean and listen to him yell. He’s been imagining it all the time for the past four days. How Dean would sound. What Dean would say. They would be sharp, his words, but not stones.

_Sammy, you little shit, you idiot._

He imagines that he would smile till his heart breaks.

“You look like a homeless bum,” he says to his reflection. Wings of hair stick up in every direction, and there are even leaves tangled in it. A long bloody smear from last night in Charlotte decorates his shirt.

He climbs on top of the commode lid, balancing on the edge of his sneakers and peering out through the tiny window. The streets are deserted but he knows that the Monster’s there. It’s always there. Where else is it going to go? It only has Sam.

Sam lets the sunglasses slide out of his fingers and onto the floor, and in the mirror on the wall, grimy with dirt and smeared with fingerprints, his eyes are a strange bright red-pink, like rhodolite, or maybe sink-washed hearts.

When Sam comes out he’s traded the T-shirt and jeans for more layers, stuff that’ll help him hide the knife. It’s more a double-edged short-handled razor than a knife, and the woeful inadequacy of it lends more heaviness to his steps. He should have taken a gun but all the guns were in the trunk of the Impala, and he didn’t know where the Impala was.

He picks up a large can of soup and listens to the pieces of chicken and vegetable sloshing inside, and he’s never been so hungry in his life. He considers sliding the can into his bag— _quickly now before the old man comes—_ but then he thinks of being caught, of police, of getting stuck in a cold holding cell, trying to explain to them that he isn’t a runaway, that he has a family (somewhere, maybe), and that he has never stolen anything in his life (so far, but he’s been an accomplice, and there were all those library books he _borrowed_ ).

It puzzles him sometimes, how normal things frighten him the most.

Social workers and overcurious teachers and the law. Embarrassment and labels and being the outsider always. The tiniest moment between the store clerk running their credit cards through a machine and handing it back, when it feels like his future hinges on the _ping_ sound the machine makes. The way Dad looks at them sometimes with endless surprise, as if he’s amazed  that they’re all still alive and mostly intact after all these years.

Sam imagines _them_ carting him off to foster care. (He’s never sure who _they_ are, but icy intuition gives _them_ names like Bismarck and Lucretia.)He’s still young enough. It’s an even more dizzying prospect than running straight into that lake and never coming up again.

And anyway, Sam also wonders what the Monster will do if he’s put in a holding cell. Squirming red images of flayed policemen come dancing into his brain and he puts the soup can back on the shelf.

_So much for that._

Coke, then. Coke is good. Coke is syrupy cold sweetness that’ll burn his throat going down.

He slides open the door of the cooler and grabs a can, and that’s when he notices that his bag is gone.

Sam looks around for a bit, knowing he couldn’t have misplaced it, but he looks anyway. Whiling his time. And then when there’s really no reason to walk up and down the aisles one more time, he makes himself  go back to the counter and the old man, who’s talking to someone else now, a customer in black.

“…that’s what I said. Cops been sniffing around the whole day now, peering into that lake. Ain’t gonna find anything, them blowhards, we’re too good for them! He went down with a rock  the size of ol’ Jupiter ‘round his neck, not even them sniffer dogs gonna sniff out _that_ corpse!”

And the man in black laughs, his eyes flicking to Sam, and they flicker a weird bright green.

“Hey, did you see my bag?” Sam asks, because now they’re both looking at him anyway, and he’s like a deer in the spotlights.

The old man behind the counter laughs, the way the Grinch that Stole Christmas might laugh. “Why, no. Didn’t you have it with you?”

There’s a picture behind his head— a Biblical verse. _Then the moon will be abashed and the sun ashamed._ Sam looks at the floor, wishing he could be more like Dean, Dean who wouldn’t panic like this, whose heart wouldn’t beat so fast that Sam’s sure it’s going to rip itself out of his chest and land on the floor in a burgundy flop.

“I’d like to have it back, please.”

“I had some rabbits that had eyes like yours,” the green-eyed man says, peering at Sam curiously. He reaches out for him and Sam jerks away,  glaring. “They died, all of them.”

The old man tosses a pack of certs from one hand to another. “Weapons are not allowed in my store, boy. Didn’t you see the sign on your way in?”

“I didn’t have anything in that bag.”

The old man snorts. “You had the Book. That’s some serious ammunition. Where d’you get it? Crossroads?”

“I haven’t been to any crossroads,” mutters Sam, looking around the edge of the counter now, trying to see if his duffel is there.

“It’s not here, little boy.”

Sam stands there, arms folded across his chest, feeling ridiculously small. He’s all long limbs and strange new angles, an awkward beanpole, and he wishes that his soul would hurry up and unfurl itself along the new length of his spine already, make him tall in the ways that matter, make him someone other than _little boy_.

“It’s at the trailer, isn’t it?”

“My sisters said there’s a boy coming for them. My sisters been watching you, boy. They been waiting and watching.”

“Okay,” says Sam, and breathes out slowly. _They know I’m coming,_ he thinks. So much for surprising them. The world’s gone all flat around Sam, flat and thin and colorless, and now there’s only one road for him to take—the one leading straight up to the trailer. “Okay. I’m going to go visit them now.”

“You do that. Dinner’s on them, they told me to tell you that.”

“Okay,” says Sam, and then the door to the store is closing behind him, and he’s out on the highway again, stumbling a bit on the cinderblock steps to the store, compensating just in time so he doesn’t end up on the asphalt.

It smells like meat here now. Roast meat and fresh pine and wind.

He doesn’t look at the road because he doesn’t want to see the Monster. _Lost the Book._ Careless with maybe a hint of deliberation.

He feels its gaze on him the whole while he takes to walk the weedy path to the trailer, through the thickets of honeysuckle and sweetbriars, past the bubbling lake.

There are symbols on the trailer door, maybe meant to keep someone out, but most likely to just keep something _in._ Sam recognizes some of them from the old library books that he’d used to help Dad with research. An Egyptian _ankh_ that used to be on pyramids and tombs. A wonky sort of cross that decorates voodoo graves in New Orleans. Here on the door they make a sort of interconnecting web of scars; magic from across countries, across centuries. Sam reaches out a hand and touches the patterns, and childish fear rears its head somewhere inside him, a tightly wound coil sprung loose, so sudden and so intense that he gasps.

 _Please,_ he thinks, too proud to say it out loud. _Please-please-please._

There’s nothing he wants more at the moment than to be back at Roxboro, back four days ago, with Dad still grumbling about the rain and driving around the power plant, yelling out of exasperation at Sam to give him _something_ to go on. Fourteen men dead by Lake Hyco, one each every day of the week for two weeks, and no research book offered any help on what monster would leave its victims smiling beatifically, innards frozen and glittering crystal red, icy intestines sparkling like Christmas festoons.

 _Well,_ Sam thinks, _now I know._

And now Dad is missing and Dean is still looking for him, back at Roxboro, and Sam is running bloody errands for a monster.

He looks back at the weed-choked path, at the slimmest rind of a moon hanging in the sky. He looks at the trees murmuring in the dark wordless tongue of firs and September and animal. There’s nothing between his heartbeats except the awful scraps of expectation.

A  breeze blows and jingles the doorbell, a faraway car backfiring scares a hundred roosting birds into the sky, and the trailer door bursts open. There’s a sound like thunder, Sam’s startled yell lost over the protest of feeble hinges, and then he’s standing with golden light pouring all over him.

“Come on in, Sam Winchester,” calls a voice that sounds like someone’s drowning and trying to talk at the same time.

Sam licks his lips, mouth gone dry as a desert, and fingers his knife.

“We ain’t got all day, boy,” a second voice calls, more impatiently, “We ain’t got all day, and the soup’s going cold.”

“Come in and bring the lantern with you, dear.”

And so Sam unhooks the unlit lantern from beside the window, takes a breath, and steps into the golden glow, closing the door behind him.

“When will you let me go?”

One hour in, and Sam _has to ask._ He fishes around in the bag of jellybeans and finds a pink one, pops it in his mouth and swallows without tasting it.

The double-headed girl ( _girls?)_ smiles with both her heads. They’re completely one person from feet to neck but at the neck they diverge, leaving a U-shaped gap between their two heads. Their necks are long, and the whole effect is that of two demented, horrific flowers sprouting from a single stem.

They wear bright silks and have the longest hair Sam’s ever seen, painted tangerine and red, all coiled together and waving like something sinuous when they move, like live snakes of fire. Their necks move the same way, coiling tightly around each other so that they end up pressed cheek to cheek, throats a tight reel of skin.

“Green,” Ashley says, just as Sam pulls out a green jellybean from the bag.

“Your brother told you to wait,” Courtney says, milky-white eyes far focused on the past, “But you didn’t, because the Monster wouldn’t wait. Do you know what it is, Sam Winchester?”

“What it becomes?” Ashley whispers.

“What gave birth to it?”

“What the end of it will mean?”

“Old as time or older still! She walked the earth when the Gods were in diapers. A Queen among Monsters, she was. Still is. Beautiful too. Like a golden seraph!”

The twins take a moment to breathe, clutching at their intertwined necks with both hands.

“We’ll tell you your past and future,” Ashley offers suddenly, grabbing Sam’s wrist and digging their nails into his skin, hard enough that he gasps and feels a hot trickle of blood oozing down his arm.

“No, thank you.”

“I see fire in his future, Courtney, hellfire—”

“Fire in his past as well, oh my—”

“Blue,” says Ashley. Their grip tightens on his arm. Sam looks miserably at the blue jellybean he’s just pulled out of the bag. The inside of the trailer is cluttered with strange, esoteric stuff: weird black clothes with two holes for two necks, perfume bottles, casks of strange liquors with stranger names and a million candles. Cheapness and old sweat intermingles with clove cigarettes and forms a heady combination that dizzies him.

“Hey,” Sam says, overcome with a sudden thought, trying to breathe around the pain of nails abusing his wrist. “Why don’t you have a third head to see the present?”

“We did,” spits Ashley, ladling more chicken soup into a bowl for Sam; he pushes it away, queasy at the blood dripping off his arm and into the murky brown liquid, “We killed her _in utero_ and the doc cut her away. She was so annoying. _Now the white blood corpuscles mix with the red blood corpuscles. Now our Momma’s drinking Dickel. Now our Daddy’s setting fire to Miss Veronica’s hair._ Now, now, now. Really, who cares about _now_ when you have the _then_ and the _later_?”

Courtney narrows her eyes. “I’m the _then_ and she’s the _later,_ if you haven’t got it yet. You don’t seem like you did, stupid child.”

“I’m not stupid.”

Ashley peers at him, curious. “Oh no, you’re not. You’re going to walk away from that family of yours one day. _Smart_. Isn’t he smart, Courtney?”

They reach over and pinch his cheek.

Sam swats them away. “Stop that.”

“But not smart enough. You’re gonna find a blonde girl. Ooh, so pretty. She’s gonna—”

“ _Stop that!”_

Courtney guffaws. “His Mom burned on a ceiling, Ashley. How fucked up is that?”

“Holy Crow, really?!”

“Yeah, and Daddy’s on a quest to kill the thing that did it, only he’s _missing.”_

Ashley groans. “The Monster took him?”

“Yup! And this is the monster-slaying martyr it found to do its dirty work.”

“Why did you take the Book, Sam Winchester? What did the Monster offer you?”

“Nothing,” Sam lies.

“I’ll tell you,” Courtney laughs, nastily. “If you come closer and let me taste your skin, I’ll tell you.”

“I’ll tell you if you’ll find your Daddy after all this errand-for-monsters shit,” Ashley offers. “It’ll just take one moment. One bite. Won’t even hurt.”

And they meet his eyes, both of them gone quiet. Sam watches himself in Courtney’s milky star-shine eyes, eyes that can read his mind, peel back the layers, ferret out all the things he wants to hide. An odd, swooping sensation comes over him and he starts, alarmed, chair titling dangerously backward before he compensates by wildly waving his arms. They make him light-headed, and Sam tears his gaze away from them, looking at the floor instead so there’s nothing but dirty trailer floor and his dirtier shoes and an empty pack of jellybeans. He feels the echoing nothingness of their minds, the cold touch of their thoughts, the dark place where their voracious ideas stew waiting for a guinea pig to test them on. They’re witches; these two—maybe one—witches that fit together in a puzzle of blood and bone.

“Do we scare you, Sam?”

“No,” Sam lies, and continues to steadfastly look at the floor.

“Look at us, then,” they say, and he does, reluctant. They’re holding the Book of Names in their hands, open to the page featuring their trailer. “How does she pick who to go after next?”

“I don’t know. I just go where the picture says to go,” mumbles Sam.

“Show us the trick,” Ashley says, pushing the Book at him.

“There’s no trick. She picks, I kill.”

Ashley clucks. “There must be a trick. What’s on the next page?”

“I don’t know. I can’t open it.”

They’re trying to turn the page now, and from outside he can hear the Monster scream its otherworldly, thunderous scream. _Come in and kill them yourself,_ Sam thinks. _If you hate them so much, come in and kill them._

“So how does it work? You just kill whatever shows up on the page? We know you killed something in Charlotte. We heard. That’s when Ashley saw you first, that you’d show up here. We’ve been watching _only you_ since.”

“Did you see me killing you?”

Courtney laughs, loudly, as if the question is hilarious. “Of course not, silly.”

Ashley suddenly perks her ears, as if listening to something. “Tell us the trick, quick. There’s no time.”

“No time?” Courtney asks, puzzled. “Why?”

“ _Tell us the trick, quick!”_

When he doesn’t speak, the twins get up and shamble to their shelves, muttering (Sam hears ‘ _someone’s coming’_ and hopes it’s the Monster) smashing against things on their way, and he wonders how they control their arms and legs. They move blindly, unable to see the present, judging on feel alone, and Sam uses the interlude to take out his knife. He hides it in his sleeve as they come back with a tiny box, and sets it on the table near the soup bowl.

From somewhere outside there’s a sound like his name, and Sam twists his head to listen better, but then there’s only the sudden, distant thunder of a freight train. Its whistle rises and then fades out to rumbling thunder.

“You know, it took us a very long time to invent this.”

“This is why she wants to kill us.”

“I don’t want to see it,” Sam says, clenching his fists. _I don’t want to see it, please._ But they’re unlocking it anyway, and he can’t help but look right at it. Fear clamps a vise around his throat and he coughs, eyes watering, his head starting to throb as the box falls open to reveal a black stone.

“How does she make the Book work? Tell us!”

And now Sam is holding his fingertips to his forehead, shaking his head from side to side—the voices are in his head and it is agony; he can’t understand their whispers but the pain from the voices is endless, incomprehensible, and surely his skull can’t take this pressure. Surely not. He doesn’t want to be alive if and when they take the stone out of that box and presses it to his skin.

He looks into its heart and sees nothing but gyrating colors, snapping sparks and hate, and, and somewhere far away, a sound like knuckles on doors.

Sam tries to stand, knife out, but he ends up just falling, falls like he’s never going to stop; _like Alice through the rabbit hole,_ Sam thinks out of nowhere, and then he lands on his knees on the trailer floor, gasping for breath, the pain in his head spotting the floor dark with blood from his nose and lips.

“You didn’t invent that,” he gasps, spiteful, grabbing onto the edge of the table and noticing, faintly, that the rapping sound is still going on, someone calling his name, and _probably just a hallucination,_ he thinks, but—

“You didn’t invent that. You’re _useless._ You’re just playing with someone else’s toy,” Sam spits, bloody, and then he lashes out, quick as he can, that razor blade slicing shallow across Ashley’s neck, lightning-quick.

The monster-twins wail and clutch at Ashley’s neck, trying to stem the thin flow of blood, and Sam strikes again, this time driving the knife through their hands, with a sick sound of tearing flesh. But then the throb in his head is at a high-tide, pulsing and pulsing, not ebbing away, and he doesn’t have enough strength to tear it out.

He grabs the box instead, screaming at the pain that brings, wrenches the stone out of it and lobs it at them. Courtney has her mouth open and panic widens her eyes so much that Sam thinks her blood vessels might pop, but then the stone lands right between her teeth. And her head, her head is ashes, pale skin turning to soot, pale teeth turning to white acid, and Ashley—bloody and trying to stretch her neck far away as she can, screeching—

_“Sammy!”_

—the stone clatters from Courtney’s not-mouth and onto the ground, and a flailing Ashley kicks it against the far wall where it shatters in an explosion of sparkling black. Sam reaches for the Book of Names, leaning too much, and upsets a whole table that comes crashing on its side, spewing bottles and strange scrolls and what looks like a child’s phalanges wrapped in thin gold wire.

He weakly twists out of the way as Ashley comes at him with a meat-cleaver, watching the steel embed itself in the table. And then there’s something behind Ashley: something big and oddly familiar, and Sam falls down—this time for good— falls on his side with the pain ebbing away from his head, tastes the salty intensity of it in his mouth, and thinks vaguely of promises that monsters make.

_I’ll tell you if you’ll find your Daddy after all this errand-for-monsters shit._

“You don’t kill us!” Ashley screeches, as the someone behind her steps around the table and presses a finger to his lips, telling Sam to be quiet. “You don’t kill me, I would have seen it if you could! And she’ll re-grow. With _me_ here she’ll re-grow! I’ve watched only you for four days now, and I’d have seen it if you kill me!”

“You should’ve kept an eye out for _me_ , then, bitch,” says the someone, and the last thing Sam sees is the barrel of a familiar Colt pressing against Ashley’s neck, and he smiles, smiles so wide it hurts, and goes happily into the temporary dark.

Sam doesn’t feel Dean carry him back down the path to where the Impala is parked, rain-slicked-dark as a water-snake. He doesn’t feel Dean’s fingers brush away the hair that falls over his eyes, or hear the muffled curse-word as his brother slams a palm onto the Impala’s hood: half in frustration, half in relief.

He doesn’t see the trailer go up in flames, or the Monster glimmering dark and shadowy as it comes up to the Impala’s windows to peer at him, or Dean when he comes back with smoke-scent hanging off of him and sharp eyes noting those black parts of the street just beyond the light-cones of streetlights.

Sam dreams of random, un-monstrous things at first: trees, and his friend from his last school dancing quadrille, and jellyfish caught in the spokes of bicycles. This last image twists and turns in his brain, electric-pink and translucent-white, tangling desolate and lost. He tugs away and runs on too-short legs towards a check-post, and the starry-eye-shine man there smiles and punches a ticket for him. Sam passes through a turnstile and into a crystal city, and then he dreams of the Monster as it goes thundering happily down the glittering alleys, devouring everything.

He’s still wearing the stupid sunglasses in the dream, and his eyes still burn when he takes them off in the sun.

Sam follows after it, clutching the Book and trying to find the next thing to kill, horrified as the Monster eats hats, pillars, pet shops, a whole library. It unhinges enormous jaws and eats a ship, two very surprised peacocks, and an entire massage parlor. It turns at an alley, and Sam sees it pick up Dean, start sucking his toes down into its throat.

“No!” Sam yells, appalled, splintering inside. There’s a marching band playing somewhere, too loud, flugelhorns blaring, and his voice is tiny, a baby voice, a little-Sammy voice, “You _promised!”_

He yanks himself out of the dream just as dream-Dean’s head disappears into the Monster’s mouth too, gasping and flailing on the seat for a minute before real-Dean gives his shoulder a shake, saying, “Whoa, Sammy, easy.”

For a few moments everything is sideways; strips of light like smooth silk, a roar like he’s in the belly of some strange beast, and Sam looks out through undulating glass and wonders if they’re boating down a magic river.

Then suddenly: a spark of clarity.

“It’s not gonna eat you,” Sam says, because that is _very_ important, Dean has to know that _right now_. “It’s really not, okay?”

He hears Dean say something back, (“You’re delirious; freaking insane”) but goes right back to sleep before he can reply, lulled by the light that comes and goes as the car moves forward into the night, by the Beatles singing through the radio, and by the part of him that knows to trust the world to keep away from him when Dean is around.

The night is an oil-slick, iridescent and wet, and Dean Winchester can breathe.

He can breathe.

He turns up the music and there is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds singing of cakes and bleach and razorblades and _wake up my love, my lover wake up._ It feels strange to be driving the car without Dad giving instructions or passed out bloody in the passenger seat.

He wishes Sam, passed out bloody in the passenger seat Sam, would wake up.

_(wake up my love, my lover wake up)_

He’s singing along and tonight he’s got a voice that cracks at the higher notes. The night is quiet and desolate and he’s reaching out for Sam. Three fingers to his forehead, like a blessing.

Benevolent dream-demons in Japan sometimes ate away bad dreams, and he would be a benevolent dream-demon if he could so that no monsters danced beneath Sam’s flickering eyes.

Dean pushes Sam’s hair away from his eyes.

Dean breathes.

Sam’s still got that Book of Names and he knows what it does, he found out in Roxboro with Sam brandishing it and pleading for Dean to go along with him. Right after Dad disappeared without a trace. Dean had spent barely half a day there after Sam had taken off, just enough time to check out the abandoned _Our Lady of Peace_ church where they’d been right before shit hit the fan. There’d been nothing there. Nothing on the EMF, nothing anywhere.

Now he touches the top of Sam’s head and wonders where they’re headed.

“We’ll tunnel our way out of this mess, Sammy,” he says, more to himself, “We’re like Captain Hilts. We’ll tunnel our way through anything.”

Sam is still asleep when Dean slows the car, thinking for a second before killing the engine. There’s not a living thing on the road— they could as well be on Venus—but there’s the inviting red and blue light of an old-fashioned coke machine by the side of the road, part of a gas-station, and well—they’re kinda running short on money.

Sticky autumn-heavy wind assaults Dean as he walks up to the cooler, rummaging in the pocket of his jeans for a bent wire or bobby pin. _Tools of the trade._ He flourishes it for an invisible audience because the whole night is making him a little hysterical, and then he inserts it into the coin-return slot, wriggling it around till suddenly, a shower of quarters and dimes explodes out of the thing. A veritable fountain of meager-wealth.

_Et voila._

“That’s illegal, Dean,” Sam says, making Dean jump and curse. He turns around and Sam grins at him, wanly.

“We’re illegal,” Dean retorts, and Sam shrugs, like, _touché._ “I see you’re back among the living. Do you want a Coke?”

“Can I have quarters for it?” Sam asks, sardonic, but not really.

He walks over to Dean but doesn’t take any quarters from him, instead bringing out loose change from his pocket.

“That was Coke money anyway. Before the old man at the store stole my bag.”

“I nearly bashed his face in, but he squealed easily enough,” Dean says, watching Sam as he sits down on the curb, hugging his knees.

“How did you find me anyway?”

“Trade secret, Sammy. I’ll tell you when you grow up,” Dean says, fake-smug and grinning in the dark. Then the truth spills out anyway, because, _huh_. Dean coughs. “Aw, shit. You’ve no freaking idea. Whole lot of panic and running from Roxboro to Charlotte because someone said you got on a bus headed there. Then when I got to Charlotte I checked the libraries first…,” Dean trails off and narrows his eyes. “You left a pretty easy trail to follow, actually.”

“What did you expect? It’s not like I didn’t _want_ you to find me.” Sam’s probably doing that looking- at-Dean sideways thing. He’s still wearing the sunglasses that look totally lame on him, and Dean bites back a one-liner about bad cops and crime-lords with great difficulty.

As though acknowledging this sacrifice, Sam takes them off. “Did someone in Charlotte tell you I’d killed a mummy?”

“A mummy?”

“It was in a cage, Dean. It was weird. It just sat there and shuffled bones around and made predictions. Must have been a thousand years old. I had to stick a knife in its eye.”

“Jesus, Sam.”

“Stuff came out of its eye,” Sam says, enthusiastically. “This whole ocean of it. Like I’d just squashed a boil.”

“Oh, shut up,” Dean shudders. He blinks his eyes to get rid of the image and sits down too, because it’s really not the kind of night that lets police cars find two boys and a jimmied coke-machine by the side of a nowhere-road.

He bumps his knee against Sam’s and thinks of how pissed he is. How very pissed. How very _angry_ at Sam for running off and leaving him to panic. There had been no Dad and no Sam and one or both of them could be in mortal peril and Dean had been stuck at the crossroads, left to choose.

There’s steam building up in him ready to blow out of his ears.

 _Yep,_ thinks Dean. He’d have killed Sam if he weren’t so flooded with relief that he can barely sit still. He looks at Sam, Sam with wavy red and blue ribbons of light illuminating his profile, and feels a sudden surge of overwhelming emotion. It accordions inside him and he clenches his teeth to hold it in, fingers curling into fists. His knuckles bloom tight against skin, baby ridges of tectonic frustration.

Then he gives in and slaps Sam’s shoulder, hard. Looks away and down the asphalt ribbon disappearing into the dark while Sam says, “Ow, _what_ ,” and spits out half a mouthful of Coke.

“Why did you have to run off, Sammy? Why couldn’t you just stay with me till we figured this out?”

Sam looks at him, huge-eyed. “We’re not getting Dad back by hanging around in Roxboro.”

“Shit. I don’t even remember anything that went down there,” Dean rubs at his temples. “You say I got knocked out, but I don’t even remember getting knocked out, man. I don’t even remember the church.”

“You got knocked out pretty fast.”

Dean tries to remember, but all his memories of Roxboro are swirling in fog. He remembers the eviscerated victims, frosted like grotesque popsicles. He remembers Dad fingering a broken padlock and chain, marked with Indian symbols, saying something. _Kids, idiots,_ blah blah, _let it out._ Then the next thing he remembers is Sam, leaning over him, his whole face ashen, clutching Dean’s arms so hard that he left crescent-moon bruises in his wake. He remembers feeling a tinge of pure misery at the expression on Sam’s face, his eyes huge and round and still their normal changeable hazel then. He remembers asking, “What? What is it, Sam?”

And then sitting up with one hand curled around the back of Sam’s head, confused, his head ringing like a meteorite had slammed into him.  He remembers Sam’s fists curled into his jacket, tears shining down his face as he held on in desperate fear.  Remembers asking, again and again. _What’s wrong? Sammy. Where’s Dad?_

“In there,” Sam had whispered, terror-struck, “He’s in there, but we can’t get him out, Dean.”

Through the throbbing in his head and Sam chattering a mile a minute, he picked up bare words, a whole tapestry of dangling story threads. _Promise_ and _monster_ and _Book,_ and _Dean, DEAN—_ Dean had put both his hands on either side of Sam’s face, _Sshhh, slow down, slow down,_ but Sam just got even more agitated.

 _We’ve to go now,_ he kept saying. _Before it changes its mind._

And of course Dean didn’t want to go anywhere, not if Dad had disappeared in Roxboro. He’d tear down the foundations of the church before he took a step out of town. What he hadn’t expected was for Sam to leave a note and just vanish.

A cold chill runs up his spine even thinking about it.

“So,” Dean says now. “Where to, Tonto?”

A car suddenly passes by, the strangers in it blue as a lament and crooning to wax-soft music, and Sam follows the streak of its red tail-lights.

“It’s not clear yet. It takes a while.”

Of course it does. Things that make no sense often work on a system that makes no sense. It’s some kind of cosmic law. “Why’s this thing killing other things anyway? You’d think they’d all chum up. Fish in the same pool and all. Isn’t it kinda making things easy for hunters?”

Sam shrugs. “Monster logic, Dean, who knows,” he pouts, and then does that thing where he scrutinizes Dean like he’s at the end of a microscope. “Don’t look at me like that. Why’re you looking at me like that? Stop looking at me like that.”

“What? Like what?”

Sam scrunches up his face. “Like I’m a stupid kid that just asked for the moon. Like I’m- I’m being an idiot.”

“Dude,” Dean huffs, and tugs a bit at his hair. He doesn’t know how to put this in a manner that won’t lead to imminent Sam-freak-out, “How do we know this thing’s going to keep its promise? It’s a _monster_. They care as much about promises as I care about trumpets. We should just go back and figure out where this thing came from, what it is, how to hurt it and put it back—”

“ _No._ ”

“—maybe we’ll talk to other hunters, see what they think—”

Something close to hysterical panic edges Sam’s voice and he gulps, shaking his head wildly. “Dean, we can’t, it’ll—”

“Hey, come on,” Dean says, squeezing Sam’s shoulder, a little bewildered at the intensity of fear in Sam’s eyes. He puts his arm around his brother when he feels Sam shaking, and tries a reassuring big-brother smile that does nothing to alleviate Sam. “We’ll surprise it.”

Sam lets out a high-pitched squeak-laugh that makes Dean jump. “ _Surprise_ it? Right. Dean, the thing is _right here_.”

“Right here? Where?”

Dean casts his gaze all over the parking lot. He doesn’t know what he expects: something to jump out from behind the gas dispensers? Jump out yelling from beneath the shrubs on the side of the road?

For a moment Dean thinks, traitorously, that this whole thing is rather strange for Sam. He’s often practical to a superlative degree, trying to explain things away with science, rarely the first one to grab a backpack and declare himself on a supernatural hunting-mission. Sure, he’s doing it for Dad, but he’s also too much _like_ Dad: calculative, cerebral, yet concerned. This new _do what the monster says_ Sam is a bit off-kilter and Dean can’t help the wriggling doubt that creeps into his mind.

“There,” Sam says glumly, pointing at empty space.

“Oh my God,” says Dean, appalled, because he sees nothing. “It followed us.”

“It goes where I go. Like gum stuck to my shoe.”

“And you’re the only one that sees it?  And that’s why you have rabbit eyes?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “That’s what the man at the store said. _Rabbit_ eyes.”

“Well, they are. You know what else they are? _Creepy_. Stop doing that,” he elbows Sam, who’s been doing the Dean’s-at-the-end-of-a-microscope thing again. “What do we do then, Sammy?”

Sam gives a hollow laugh. “What it wants. Dean, we’ve got to go along with it.”

Dean squints at the space where Sam said the monster was, trying to see anything that’d suggest it was there. A blip. A wave. A rip in the space-time continuum.

Nothing.

“ _Dean,”_ Sam says now, tugging at Dean’s sleeve, his eyes beseeching, firming Dean’s belief that it should be made illegal for anyone to achieve the kind of effect Sam manages with that look. “Look, I don’t like it. But you _know_ there’s nothing we can do back at Roxboro. You know this is the only way. I don’t want to do it alone. You’ve to—you _have_ to come with me, please, Dean—”

“You’re not doing anything alone,” Dean says, snappily. “This is the stupidest, most ridiculous thing _ever,_ but you’re not doing it alone,” he shakes his head and then tries a fake-smirk. “I mean, what would you do without me anyway? I mean, that was some entrance I made back there, huh? There should be, like, songs about it.”

“ _Songs_ ,” snorts Sam, but he gives Dean a careful, happy smile, seeming to suddenly deflate into something small and young, something bright that Dean could cup in his hands and hold inside of him.

“We’ll get him back, Dean,” Sam says, fiercely. “Won’t we?”

“Yeah,” says Dean, and has to stop himself from letting his stupid betraying voice trail it into a question. “Yeah, you bet we will. Okay, Sammy? We _will._ ”

Sam’s face is as if Dean’s just gone and fixed the whole world. Dean’s seen it a lot these fifteen years, and every time, it’s like he doesn’t know what to _do_ with Sam. The feeling is a low key note vibrating down his spine, and he grits his teeth against it, holding Sam tighter. “ _Ow,”_ whispers Sam, but then a disoriented egret swoops down from some invisible perch, wings ninja-whooshing over a thatch of grass, and Sam’s distracted enough that he says nothing more at all.

 

**PART TWO**

_Fathers:_ zero.

 _Mothers:_ zero.

 _Brothers:_ two. _Monsters:_ one???

 

Sometimes Dean gets scared, but most of the time he’s like a jack-in-the-box without a crank.

Somewhere inside of him is a fire-blasted steel box that holds in all the childhood bogeymen that never really got to do a number on him; locked in and sealed and packed in a cloud of whistling nonchalance. He never touches it, but harbors a strange feeling that the box grows larger year by year, fattening itself on his knowledge of every new monster, his every new fear.

 _(and one day,_ sings that voice inside of him he wishes would shut up and die, _one day it’s all going to come out)_

He and Sam take a meandering path that leads to peculiar monsters. A woman with a bullet in her head in West Virginia. A manticore in Ohio. In Indiana, two chalk-white men with red-stained lips lead them on a chase through abandoned alleyways, and it takes a strategically placed loose girder and a fair bit of sharp shooting to bring them down.

Every time, they wait blood-spattered and breathless for the new name in the Book.

Dean wonders how long they’ll have to keep doing this.

Sam rubs at his eyes and complains that the sun hurts them. Sometimes he talks to the monster, and this horrible, staggeringly awful thought goes shrieking down the hallways of Dean’s mind that _there’s nothing there._ Of course, he doesn’t actually believe that, because Sam _is_ leading them to monsters, isn’t he?

Dean has the same dream every night.

The ruby gleam of an alligator eye chases Dean into a lake, and: _it’s all your fault,_ he thinks.

 _Mom,_ he thinks.

Sometimes he feels an impotent, chalk-neutral rage towards her. Her death is the black hole from which soar enthusiastic disasters, one after the other. _Mom,_ he thinks—a fiery summons. The word is a spark that fizzles against a soggy matchbox; written on a car window with condensation gasping it out soon as you write it in. Sometimes it’s emptiness; sometimes the bright yellow warmth of the buoyant force keeping you afloat.

 _You fight that bastard, Dean-o,_ he hears Dad say, and wonders what he’s fighting. The _Our Lady of Peace_ church is full of water and the alligator is a dark twisting shape dancing deasil around him, black as pitch, loose as hallucination.

Then it dissolves, in that way dreams sometimes yield to memory, and okay—yeah, Dean remembers this part where I-don’t-see-why-I-can’t-wait-in-the-library Sam had sulked outside the church doors with a shotgun that looked comical in his grasp, not to mention pointed where shotguns should not—in any universe—be pointed.

Dad had been fumbling with the loose mass of chains locking the doors, and the church, still dark and unformed in Dean’s memory ( _it’s only a dream, after all)_ had loomed above them. Moonlight had yanked Sam and Dean’s shadows into strange, grotesque things.

The Sam-shadow was taller than the Dean-shadow and looked strangely carnivorous.

“Aw. Scared, Samantha? Don’t worry, you’re the lookout.” Dean said, laughing from the doorway.

Sam gave him a look (one day, Dean thought, he’ll have sharpened this look to incisive perfection, and it’d give you hemorrhages to even watch him)

“I’m not scared. ‘Coz there’s nothing to be scared of. All the dead guys were down near the lake, not _here._ This is stupid.”

“Yeah, you tell yourself that,” Dean grinned. “All chicken-shit, Sam. You know it, I know it. This monster likes church-y wrecks.”

He held up the EMF as proof. Sam shook his head at the flashing lights and turned away, stomping a few steps through the overgrown weeds, tripping on a rusted can and nearly tumbling ass-over-elbow onto the ground. Dean snickered.

“Dude. It’s not that hard. Left foot, then right. And repeat.”

“Shut up. _Jerk_.”

“You’re like a duck on stilts.”

“Quit it.”

Dean killed a half-snort dead as he turned to face Dad.

“If you’re both done, _already,_ ” Dad said, and Dean remembers breathing a, “Sorry. Sir,” and following him into the church.

_(what was inside: graffiti, blazingly blasphemous; a stained-glass Jesus, holes in the glass like blood spatters; an abalone Mary, spooky and nacreous; something quick and fleeting—shadows, luna moths, dickybirds; and gleaming over there, brilliant as an ‘ah-ha!’ moment: bells. Big bells, those Dutch-type that you saw in postcards, glass and enamel and painted. And on a table, a basin of water.)_

“Dad,” Dean had said. There was a hole in the ceiling of the church, he remembers that, like something big had taken a bite out of it and then grown uninterested. Through it, slick moonlight shone on the water.

John was strangely quiet. The silence bothered Dean, yanked at his skin and made his hair stand up. His eyes snagged on a strange dark shape in the corner, a patch of shadow oddly fluidic—like smudges of India ink. _Jesus Christ._ It moved. They _all_ moved, all those funny shadows pressed up against the walls, some sliding down the blistering plaster and pooling onto the debris of splintered pews and unearthed stone before taking smudgy animal shape.

He felt some of them flutter around him, ghostly fingers scratching down his arm.

“Dean—” he heard Dad say, and turned—and caught all but a glimpse of something twelve, thirteen, fifteen feet tall, and dark; heard the awful _schnip-schnip_ of wings, and then something like a planet crashed into him, birthing a long, loose trail of bright orange stars behind his vision.

He always has to swim through red-white explosions to wake up.

“Dean?”

“Ssshh, Sam.”

The railroad tunnel picks up both their voices, and Dean can hear faint echoes bouncing off into the darkness on both sides.

Sam leans closer to whisper, his fingers a vice around Dean’s wrist. “I think I hear her.”

“Just the wind,” Dean says, and clenches his teeth around the flashlight.

“Don’t you—you don’t hear lots of footsteps?”

“Mmph,” says Dean, because he has the flashlight in his mouth, fuzzy beam opening onto his shoes like a shiny portal to some other world. He tugs the Book out of Sam’s hands and stares at the tangled words and images in it, then compares it to a cutout from a library book. Okay, they’re dealing with something called a _blemmye._ It looks like a man-potato with a face where faces shouldn’t be.

“So its mug is on its stomach? How does that make any sense?”

Sam squirms next to him and snuggles closer. The tunnel is dark and wet, rivulets of water running down the curving walls and occasionally dripping behind the collar of Dean’s shirt. Every drop of water makes Sam jump and gaze around with saucer-sized eyes.

“Their brains are on their stomachs…”

“Then where are their stomachs?”

“I don’t know. Technically, they’re called _anthropophagi._ Flesh-eaters,” Sam pauses, as if he’s taking stock of his thoughts. “They were on Popeye.”

“ _What?”_

Sam sighs. “There was this one time in Popeye—Dean, did you hear that?”

“It’s just the rain. Outside.”

“It’s not.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Are you insane? How’m I supposed to go to sleep when there’s a corpse walking around?”

Fair point.

Elise Winworth’s been a corpse for two weeks now, but a day after her death she’d disappeared from the morgue, and begun renting this unused old tunnel. Sam said she farmed _blemmyes,_ which was the strangest thing Dean had ever heard. How do you farm a monster? Truthfully, it was a rhetoric question. But Sam knew _facts_ about monster reproduction, and Dean had had to silently jam _Survivor_ in his head while Sam blathered on about mouth-sacs and parasitic zygotes and what not. Apparently, these monsters only grew during fall. If you were harvesting them, now would be the best time.

“We should have come during the day,” Sam says. “If my eyes didn’t hurt from the light. We should have- we should have come during the day. We wouldn’t be lost. Dad would have come during the day.”

Dean wishes he wouldn’t bring up Dad. Thinking about him made him think about the church and gave him throbbing headaches.

“We didn’t know it went on this long,” Dean says, mollifying, meaning the tunnel. He wonders if the tunnel is magic too. If it grows longer and longer the more they walk, more tangled, more maze-like. He has a sudden horrible thought about being lost in here forever.

Some future expedition might find their bones. _Exhibit 2A and 2B._

“Hey, Dean,” mutters Sam, but doesn’t complete the thought. He angles his flashlight so the beam cuts over Dean’s shoes. Dean’s done the same. _This way, I know you’re still here._

Sam nuzzles against him and Dean smiles, involuntary. He’s warm weight and all hard angles, and honestly it’s kind of uncomfortable, but it’s still Sam.

There must be a storm outside. The inside of the tunnel vibrates to it, ghostly tunes like an amplifying conch. Dean figures out that he can change the pitch of the whistling by moving his body this way and that.

Something grunts in the dark.

Sam says, “That’s _definitely_ not the wind.”

“It could be a dog.”

Sam huffs a scared laugh. “Yes, Dean, a dog in the dark. That makes it _so_ much better.”

“Hey, I don’t know about you but I’d rather a dog than a cannibal with no head.”

“Listen!” Sam says, as the grunting noise comes again. It sounds like something scratching along the walls, shuffling on its feet, grunting along. Dean feels a hysterical impulse to laugh and tamps it down.

“You wanna shine the flashlight on it?”

“You do it, you wuss!”

“ _Dean.”_

“Okay,” says Dean, gritting his teeth. “I can shine a flashlight _._ ”

He picks it up and it glitters off wet stones, the curving dark rails. The beam catches nothing at first, but then Dean waves it and it shines off a white hospital gown, a drooping face with eyes that roll milky white , viscous with red tears.

“Don’t shoot,” Sam breathes.

“Find the nest. Gotcha.”

The creature that was Elise Winworth scuttles towards them, and it’s like all the sounds in the tunnel get amplified. The horrible _drip drip_ of moisture from the curved ceiling, the low thrum of railings in the memory of phantom trains. And the whistling that changes with every movement, like a pack of ghostly instrumentalists.

They plaster themselves against the wall, not daring to breathe. The creature stops in front of them for a second, two; its eyes roll towards the spot where they are, and Dean moves almost involuntarily, just a half-step in front of Sam. His hand clenches on his knife, but then the moment passes, the thing loses interest in them and shuffles on.

It takes a minute before Dean lets out a breath.

Sam gasps, “You’re, uh, kinda squeezing me, Dean.”

Dean tries to cough discreetly at the cloud of rancid smell the thing left behind, and ends up gagging instead.

They follow Elise Winworth down the tunnel. Maybe it’s stupid or whatever: they aren’t really lost in a Minotaur’s maze here, and this monster is not exactly fast, but Dean keeps finding Sam in the dark. _Can’t keep an eye on him if I can’t see him._ The tunnel curves and crumbles into nothing abruptly; moonlight a sudden shower, rain an utter thing that pounds into old weathered stone, and the flotsam of a party-wreck: beer bottles, spray cans, graffiti.

Dazzled, Dean doesn’t see where the monster’s gone.

“In there,” Sam says, and points to where the tunnel begins again.

“It can’t walk, but it can climb goddamn fast,” mutters Dean, trying to climb over the rubble.

He’s the first one to the other side, feet slipping on rain-slicked stones, blinded by the storm. He’s still blinking water from his eyes when he hears Sam shout, “ _Dean!”_

 _Oh, you must be freaking kidding me,_ Dean has time to think, as the thing jumps out of the shadows at him. There’s a sudden flash of broken yellow nails, a jagged streak of pain down his arm, and without really thinking, Dean raises the shotgun and bashes the thing’s head with it. He whacks wildly at its arm until it lets go, noticing vaguely that on either sides of him a hill rises, that there is a depression in the surface, like a cave. Something strangely human-shaped pulls itself out of the rubble and blinks at Dean.

“Baa,” it flirts.

 _This must be the nest,_ he thinks faintly, right before eyes pop up all around the creature: ten, twelve pairs. _It really does have its mug on its stomach._

Dean rams the shotgun into what’s left of Elise Winworth’s face, then takes off in a run down the tunnel. The _blemmyes_ come right after him, strange underdeveloped legs pounding on loose stones and rails. Gasping, Dean shoots wildly behind him, cold stabs of horror running through him when sick splatters follow as a consequence.

It’s like he’s in a video-game with all the monsters after him. Hit all, get a bonus, only not really.

There’s a door suddenly: bright red and rusted, iron chain crumbling beneath Dean’s hands, and he slams against it, trying to force it open, only it really doesn’t want to…

 _Fuck,_ he thinks, and tries again, blood rushing in his ears. Then the door opens to a maintenance room of some sort, but too late.

A few of those _things_ follow him in, and Dean trades shotgun for machete, hacking and slashing as the things crowd closer, blinking and opening giant mouths of lamprey-sharp teeth. He sticks his knife in one’s shoulder and bursts an artery, and a stream of blood shoots out like a fountain. Blinded, he yanks the knife out and sticks it somewhere else, but then one of the things tackle him, sending him crashing to the floor.

He screams as sharp teeth latch onto his shoulder. He goes down on the floor, and it’s like being in a pile-up with several bulky naked babies, only not funny at all.

His heart rattles against his ribs, but then slows down worryingly. He throws two of the blinking monsters off him, but then a very National Geographic voice is in his head (… _tranquilizing venom to take down its prey before feeding…)_ and it becomes a horrible struggle between staying awake and fighting, dodging the sharp teeth coming at him from every direction. Then, suddenly, the creatures are scuttling off him, and he sees Elise Winworth’s decaying face. She leans down and yanks at his shirt, and her hand comes away bloody. Dean watches her pop a finger in her mouth and taste his blood. Probably checking nutritional value for her baby monsters.

He never figures out what she thinks, though, because right then a knife rips through her belly, spraying blood and guts, and Dean scrambles away from being deluged in the mess. Sam hacks the knife right up, cracking open the creature’s ribs, and _oh God,_ Dean thinks, _what the fuck is that?_ A strange, pinkish creature with barbed claws sheds Eliza’s body like a shroud and crawls out, barbs scratching against the ground. _Headless._

Dean remembers faintly from Sam’s blathering that _anthropophagi reproduce by incubating inside a human host, while using some kind of neurotransmitter to make sure the host provided for its brethren in their nest._

Fuck, monster logic.

He grips his bleeding shoulder and backs against the wall. He should probably help Sam but it doesn’t look like Sammy needs any help at all; he shoots the crawling thing until the barrel is empty and smoking, and when that doesn’t seem to work, he whirls on the spot, finding the machete, sticking it in the thing’s mouth. It drops, twitching.

“Come on, Dean!” Sam says, and he sounds far away. “We’ve to feed those things the corpse!”

 _You should see Sammy right now,_ Dean tells an absent parent. _You should see him. I’m sure he’s having a psychotic break of some sort._ Pride and horror pools sickly in his gut and all he wants to do suddenly is to crawl into Sam’s head and undo whatever part of his little brother that now says things like _feed those things a corpse_.

“ _Dean!”_

Dean is far away. His lungs feel stuffed full of cotton. The back of his neck is melting away and the feeling is spreading to his head. Legs detaching from arms detaching from neck. Kinda like one of them do-it-yourself Happy Meal action figures. Sam had a hell lotta dinosaurs that one time they gave out Land Before Time swag.

Sam. _Sammy._

He blinks and Sam is in his face, bloody. Dean notices vaguely that he’s wearing that Disneyland T-shirt they got from a store near Anaheim last year. “So _,_ ”Sam had said, “I can pretend to have been there.”His eyes are huge and have that funny watercolor glaze. When he was smaller, he looked like that when he wanted a hug. Does he want a hug?

Sam slaps him, hard enough that little stars explode in Dean’s vision.

“Dude, _what,”_ Dean mumbles, a bit flabbergasted.

“Dean, don’t you _dare—”_

He doesn’t complete the threat, instead yanking at Dean’s sleeve, dragging him to his feet. Sam tugs and pulls, and Dean’s feet scrape the floor, and through the sleepiness he also manages to be annoyed. “I can do it myself,” he hisses, slapping uselessly at Sam’s hands.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Dean, you gotta help me here, man, I can’t carry it alone.”

 _Carry what?_ Dean thinks, and then Sam gives him a leg to hold and _oh. Oh._

“What,” asks Dean, swallowing, “what are we doing with her?”

Sam doesn’t answer him except for in a grunt while he leans to pick up Elise Winworth’s head. They drag the ripped open corpse to the door and Dean can hear the remaining _blemmyes_ thumping against it. From the sound of it, they’re throwing themselves against the door.

“On the count of three, okay?” Sam says, and Dean panics because, “One,” _what? What are they supposed to be doing?_ “Two,” and now Sam is working the door open, sliding the rusted bolt out, “Three!”

Some last-minute flare of genius, and Dean heaves Elise Winworth’s corpse towards the surging group of monsters at the same time that the door opens, and then Sam is tugging at his clothes, “Run!”

Dean half runs, half lets Sam drag him along up the tunnel and towards the crumbled opening, throwing a quick glance over his head as he does.

The pack has abandoned pursuit of them and now rips into the corpse free of one of their growing kind, tearing into it with a ravenous frenzy.

 _Thank goodness I have a strong stomach,_ he thinks, and the last he sees of Elise Winworth is her dark curls, disappearing into the maw of one of the creatures.

_We need to stop this,_ is the first coherent thought that forms in Dean’s head, when they get out far enough into the woods fringing the tunnel. Sam’s fingers fly over his shoulder, cutting strips from a piece of cloth that apparently came out of nowhere.

“There, you’re done,” he says, and then squeezes Dean’s arm tight, like he’s making sure his blood is still circulating.

“We need to stop,” Dean says, and Sam’s eyes go wide, dismayed.

“Stop what?”

“This,” he makes a vague gesture. “This, what we’re doing. Hey, monster!”

“No, Dean,” Sam says, his fingers tight on Dean’s arm. Dean shakes him off and Sam’s eyes shine unearthly, dark and hurt. For a moment, Dean’s almost spooked out by them, and then he remembers, _this is Sam._ Sam’s watching him, uncertain, pained. _Please,_ he’s saying. _There’s no point._

“Hey, monster,” Dean says again, but weakly.

“We need to burn them,” Sam says, wraps his arms around himself, shivers. “They’re not meant to be eating corpses, only fresh meat. So they’ll die. Soon. Then we need to burn them.”

Something bitter and strange burns at the back of Dean’s throat, and his mouth tastes of rainwater and old pennies. _Ann McCarthy throws the best parties ever_ , he thinks, nonsensically. That was two weeks and two states ago, somewhere in…where was it? Utah? Uranus? A Polaroid image of a bright redhead floats through his brain, this girl all sparkly bra-straps and secrets, and then it disappears and there’s nothing but darkness again. Blue-yellow-red smudged darkness. Far, far above there’s a moon like a watchful eye.

“I feel funny,” he says, and watches Sam’s face crumple. He looks like a ten year old.

“Um. Those things are venomous. But, uh, help is coming.”

“Help?”

Sam shows him the Book. Focusing, Dean can make out vague images of long-limbed, psychotic looking women.

“We need to get to Savannah.”

The burning and salting goes faster than expected, and Dean’s head is swimming by the time they make it to the highway. Far away in the darkness is two pinpricks of light—the headlights of some car.

“They’ll take us. They’re headed there.”

Something’s wrong about this. Dean fishes around and it comes to him, a pang of dismay. “We can’t leave Baby behind!”

“We’ll come back for her. You—we need to get to Savannah now.”

Dean musters all his remaining energy into giving Sam an exasperated look. It comes out harder than he intends, lost halfway between exasperation and scorn. Sam flinches a bit, but sticks out his thumb, resolutely.

The Oldsmobile grinds to a stop.

  **PART THREE**

Elsewhere, in storm-free Savannah, four women lean over a spread of bright cards, the _tarot de Marseilles._ The future isn’t writ in them and their garish vegetable colors, but Nerissa claims the cards help her concentrate, so cards it is.

“Two of them,” Nerissa says, squeezing her taxidermied bobcat. “Dog picked them up hours ago.”

The other three don’t move from their languid positions on ottomans. Indeed, if one were to closely observe them at the moment, there will be nothing to read from their faces except a mild interest. It isn’t the devil that’s coming for them, after all. Just a couple of boys with a martyr complex. These marble walls have seen worse things.

Imogene raises a glass of cognac to her lips and scratches absently at the edge of the table with a knife. “Do they bring anything?”

While Nerissa concentrates, Madam Dorcas and Melina cut wards on each others’ skin.

Madam Dorcas is smoking something icy green and stifling, and the smoke rises from her lips. Melina sniffs like a puppy, dark eyes wide and faded blackberry lips pursed, and finally announces, “Vetiver, jasmine, serotonin, angel blood!”

Madam Dorcas and Imogene clap, bored. They’re always bored, bored to death, bored beyonddeath _;_ these ladies dressed in crinolines and silks and heavy velvet. Existing in some kind of charade of campy mysticism, trying to fool the community into believing they were just harmless, kooky Society types. It’s endless, the game, and one must have martyr boys to stir things up a little.

From upstairs, there’s a horrendous sound like something very large and very otherworldly screaming. The house begins to shake; bits of white plaster floating down from the ceiling, and the chandeliers flicker a warning.

“Shut up, Richard!” yells Madam Dorcas.

“Yes, _do_ shut up!” Melina says, and then gasps and giggles as Madam Dorcas cuts a line across her throat. While Melina chokes and laughs and rolls about, Madam Dorcas, the true matriarch of the Tersias Bede Tea Society and Book Club, turns her gaze to Nerissa.

“Is something else with them?”

The question is barely out of her mouth before Nerissa begins to choke. She falls back from her bright yellow stool and lands with strange elegance on the floor, her fingers going to her neck, long nails ripping at her skin as she tries to fight with her invisible attacker. Flecks of blood and spit flies from her mouth, and she’s trying to say something, something that starts with a sibilant hiss, a sound like ‘S’ or maybe ‘Z’. Imogene makes a low sound of anguish in her throat and grabs Nerissa, pressing violet kisses along her neck and down her arms, cooing in Latin and French and Arabic.

Melina stops her theatrics, startled, while Madam Dorcas—ever the one with the presence of mind— grabs the ornate candle-stand by the piano and holds it to the silk scarf that holds the cards. 

 

 

And then she sets the hundred-and-eighty year old French tarot deck on fire.

Instantly, Nerissa stops convulsing and falls silent and blue.

“She is dead!” wails Imogene, ever the drama-queen, and promptly faints.

“You must live,” Madam Dorcas tells Nerissa, leaning next to her and slapping the girl on both cheeks. She grabs Nerissa’s heavy dark plaits in one hand and tugs at them. “You must live or I shall cut off all your precious hair and I shall _burn_ it so your ghost may haunt us forever more with a bald head.”

“ _No,”_ whispers Imogene, opening one eye, horrified and delighted all at once.

“No!” wails Nerissa, both her eyes snapping open. She contents herself with one last almighty convulsion, and then she sits up and blinks her eyes and launches into this: “My sisters, you cannot _imagine_ what I have seen, what creature I have borne dark witness to, for it is dark, that which follows the Winchester brothers like a puppy on a leash—”

“A puppy on a leash?” “A dragon on a diamond-collared leash, is that better?”

Richard growls and shakes the house again, and Madam Dorcas wants to set _everything_ on fire, suddenly, existential crises swimming up inside of her like wildfire. She blinks back sudden tears.

Nerissa coughs and pulls out her dark-prophetess voice, “—that which has followed them since Lake Hyco and the absconding of their father—”

“Do continue, Nerissa!”

“And she, the dark-woman, she is the _Mistress of the Book of Names_.”

Silence. The chandelier revolves slowly on the ceiling and then falls, straight down in a shower of plaster, crashing into a thousand glittering fragments on Madam Dorcas’s head.

 _Kind of fitting for the moment,_ she thinks. She stands, unmoving, with glass in her hair and glass in her face, blood in her hair and blood on her lips, and hisses, very quietly, “ _What did you say?”_

“I said she is the Mistress of the Book of Names,” Nerissa says, gone pale now, pale as funeral lilies and snow. Melina sits down on her stool, her knees giving out.

“They have the Book? They actually have _the_ Book?” Imogene asks.

“Yes,” mutters Nerissa.

“Hunting knives,” barks Madam Dorcas. “Bring out the hunting knives.”

And as though her orders are a subtle incantation, faint magic to bring about portended doom, the doorbell rings—long and sober and electric-fake—and from outside trills the laugh of the weird, unlikable Sparrow-thing.

 

Sam doesn’t like this house one bit, but what needs to be done needs to be done.

Low sprawling oaks and magnolias line the overgrown garden. Late stars blink, and light begins at the east, lemony and cool. The tangle of Spanish moss chokes other trees, and into a dark pool flanked by broken marble angels spiral sticky white magnolia blooms. The whole night is suffocating and sweet and they don’t _do_ suffocating and sweet. If Dad were here, and things were different, there’d be more gasoline and gunpowder, less gardens to choke on.

But the garden is a welcome distraction from the salt-tang of rust and blood— his _brother’s_ blood. Sam sneaks worried glances at Dean, but Dean is too busy gazing at the yellow-lit windows of the tall house—all Gothic pillars and mansard roof—and honestly, he looks a bit out of it. He looks like he’d probably fall asleep on the spot if Deirdre weren’t poking at him to keep him moving.

Sam jabs Dean in his ribs and tries not to think about how it’s like poking at a furnace bare-handed.

“Hey, Dean—,” he says, but the whole way from wherever-they-were to Savannah has been a series of _Hey Dean_ s, ploys to keep him awake, and Sam’s run out of things now. He casts about in his mind for familiar faces and comes up with empty rinds. All the faces in his mind look like the Scream. “Uh—you remember Ann McCarthy?”

“Shut up, Sam,” Dean rasps.

 _Okay,_ then. He probably doesn’t want to remember Ann McCarthy anyway. Really, who would. She was way too wild even for Dean.

Sam takes a look over his shoulder and the Monster is still sulking there, and _goddamn it,_ this is ridiculous.

“You boys are in a right spot of trouble,” Sparrow says, pressing on the doorbell. “Hey, Disneyland. Why’d you pick up the Book anyway? This one don’t seem like the type to settle for a low price.”

And now he can sense Dean looking at him with interest too. Sam purses his lips and says nothing, and the secret is a thin stab in his mouth. The lack of Deirdre to prod him around suddenly seems to take a toll on Dean, who slumps forward. Deirdre pushes him into a wicker chair by the side of the door and raps at the door while Sam hovers, miserable.

The woman who opens the door is ghoulish and white, tiny Russian-doll woman with beetle-black eyes. Her eyes jump from the three errand-runners to Sam, then to Dean.

“Oh, poor dear!” she exclaims suddenly, hands fluttering around Dean like bejewelled butterflies before she sinks her nails into his bicep, making Sam wince. “Well, don’t stand around! Come in!”

It’s like being stuck in a gothic B-movie: paintings of strange gods and stranger people, home-made taxidermy and game-boards, and then a room with a broken chandelier in the middle of the floor.

“This monster of yours sure knows how to pick ‘em,” mutters Dean, scowling.

Something screams from upstairs and Sam jumps, knocks against a carafe on a one-legged stool and sends it crashing to the floor.

“Never mind,” the woman says, waving dismissively at Sam’s not-very-apologetic expression, “That’s just Richard. He’s temperamental. My name’s Imogene. What got your brother?”

“Um. A _blemmye._ We killed it.”

“Right, I know just the thing. Of course, you’ll have to swear to take your monster and leave if we help you. We know it wants to kill us.”

Sam looks at her levelly, and then Dean extricates himself out of her grasp, face screwed in annoyance.

“Look, lady. Fix my head,” he slurs, rubbing a hand over his face, “and we’ll leave you alone.”

The grin on the lady’s face is a rictus, mad thing, and she nods.

“Okay. Okay, then, follow me. _You,”_ she barks at Sam, and then smiles at him, sickly sweet, “wait in the main room, dear.”

“No, I’m coming with,” Sam says, but Dean gives him a strange look, like he’s seeing Sam for the first time.

“I’ll be fine, dude.”

Deirdre grabs Sam when he tries to follow Imogene and Dean down a corridor, and he struggles against her strangely strong grip, going wild until she rasps, “I’m not trying to kill you, you idiot. You heard her. You need to wait out here. Don’t want your brother to crisp up now, do you?”

Sam bites her on principle anyway, gagging at the river-weed taste. Deirdre says, “ _Fuck,”_ and elbows him hard. His breath rushes out of him and he doubles over, gasping. The room swirls sickeningly in his vision. Deirdre drags him back in the direction of the sofa and plops him down on it.

“ _Sit,_ ” she says, and walks to the doorway before turning back, contemplative. “You killed the Vaudeville twins?”

Sam stiffens. “Yeah, why? Friends of yours?”

“Never liked them. Evil rouge-obsessed bitches. So pretentious.”

She leaves, and Sam rubs his ribs and mutters curses (because he can, what the heck) until the taxidermied cat on the table sighs.

“No manners to these hunter spawn. No manners at all,” it says, and Sam is pissed enough at the world that he grabs a flower vase, puts it over its head, and sighs at the deluge of irreverent vocabulary he’s treated to as a result.

_(something is close)_

Lying flat, Dean can see the stone floor and a line of ants marching in a line over the baseboard. They seem to originate from the stems of long-necked flowers in a pot at the foot of a table, millions of ants, spiralling into kaleidoscopic patterns.

_(something goes spidering over his brow, something dry and scented floral)_

It’s funny, how the flowers are a strange, pale green. White-green, blinding. They’re so luminous. They hurt his eyes. He does not quite know what to do with himself.

_(it cups a dry hand beneath his neck and says something, and smiles at him, and he smiles back, automatically)_

Everything is soft, smudged and silent. Like those videos of volcanoes exploding put to mute. It’s so strange. Dean frowns, fidgets with his fingers.

_(the thing, the flickering face, and something clamps down on his lips, something papery and hot, something cleaves to his tongue and tastes of dark herbs and stranger things)_

His eyes roll towards the ants and the flowers because he doesn’t want to see this thing. He feels its touch against his skin, the shock of it razoring down his spine. He begins to choke.

“Get away from me!”

Dean tries to slam a fist in the thing’s nose as he scrambles away, but the woman dodges him.

“Rise and shine,” says Imogene. “I was only trying to cure you. You fell unconscious before we could administer the anti-venom.”

“Yeah, lady, you administer the anti-venom by _kissing_?”

“It’s preferable. We don’t get boys in here much.”

Dean gapes. “Well, fuck that.”

“The mouth on you brats. Cussing like sailors,” Imogene clucks, disapprovingly. “I could have easily poisoned you, you know.”

Dean narrows his eyes. “So why didn’t you?”

Imogene looks at him, eyes twinkling. She gets up and disappears from his vision, and Dean watches her feet disappear through the door. Something grunts sleepily from within the room.

Dean follows the sound with his eyes, not daring to breathe.

“Oh, _crap._ ”

Sam doesn’t know how long he waits in the antechamber with the talking cat, but it has to be a long, long time. He can feel the Monster getting antsy outside.

The Savannah night prickles hot at his neck and simultaneously freezes his hands somehow. He squirms trying to get comfortable in a chair that’s anything but. He won’t go back to the sofa, because there are weird stains on it.

Sam closes his eyes and imagines differentiating a polynomial. He wonders if the Impala is still caught out in the rain, if the weeds will tangle with the metal, if the water will rise and float their arsenal.

“If you take the flower-vase away, I’ll tell you a secret.”

Sam glowers at the cat. “I don’t want to hear a secret.”

“They won’t let you go, you know. They’re murderers. Augurers. They rip apart your stomach to read your future from your intestines. They’ve probably eaten your brother already,” the cat says, and purrs.

“That’s not true.”

A headache throbs from Sam’s temples to his earlobes. He puts his feet up on the chair too; contracts into the smallest Sam Winchester in the world. He scrunches up his face tight enough that he imagines his eyes are nothing but tiny crescent-shaped lines.

“I heard them talking. This thing that’s with you, it thinks it’s an angel, or a God. Which makes you the visionary little martyr. The Joan of Arc. A boy-version of it, but still. You know what happened to her!”

 _Close your eyes,_ Sam thinks, _and imagine_ normal.

Normal is a nice (blue?) house with a white trim. Normal is waking up in the same bed every day. Normal is fighting with Dean over silly things and doing homework and not having to hear your heart flutter till you gauged how much salt there was in a house, and exactly where it was. Normal does not have the aftertaste of motor oil. Normal is—normal is “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie” playing through a radio, and jam-sticky hands, and, and silly G-rated productions of _Annie_ or _Grease_ —

“You can’t get away,” the cat says, gruffly. “You _can’t._ Take this silly flower vase off my head for I can see right through you even with it. You can’t get away, Sam Winchester. _”_

Sam startles when a woman swoops into the room, dark hair in thick plaits over her shoulder.

“Your brother’s okay,” she smiles, and Sam lets go of the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been rationing, like _whoosh,_ and wonders if he deflates quite a bit. “I’m Nerissa. Has the cat been giving you trouble?”

There’s something about this lady. Some strange scent hanging around her like embalming fluid and age. Sam imagines Dad saying, _some mysteries you want to keep that way: a mystery_.

“Can I see Dean?”

“Not yet, honey.”

“Okay. When can I see Dean? Where did you put him?”

Nerissa regards him coolly. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“No,” says Sam, although his stomach disagrees loudly.

“We have pie.”

“Dean’s the one who likes pie,” says Sam, and smothers his knees with splayed fingers.

“It’s pecan.”

Sam watches her wordlessly for about a minute before uncoiling himself from the chair. Only because the cat is now singing _Bye, Bye Miss American Pie_ , and it’s the creepiest rendition of that song ever.

There’s a slice of (very good) pecan pie. Sam looks at the whorls on the table, the wooden lines that tangle and warp and tells the age of the timber, and he thinks about the expression on Dean’s face when Sam ripped Elise Winworth open. Really, what did he expect? Sam feels a sickening horror even thinking about it, but what has to be done has to be done, you know.

He puts his head on the table and sighs.

There’s no Nerissa here now, and Sam looks at the clock in the corner of the room. Everything here, except that neon faced clock over there, is oddly Victorian. There are a lot of words for it. Arabesque, grotesque, other things ending in –esque. Except the clock. Such a happy faced clock. Sam looks at it and grasps about for another word. That clock is so….what was it? Anachronistic? In this house, yes. His head whirls just looking at it. All the numbers are dancing.

(a voice floating in his head says _really, Sam, didn’t your Mommy ever tell you not to accept food from strangers?)_

 _No,_ Sam thinks, and is astonishingly sad. Like he’s just stepped on a butterfly.

His last thought is _please don’t let them eat me,_ thought fervently and addressed to nothing.

“Picked the short straw, you did,” simpers Deirdre, from outside the window of the room Dean’s trapped in.

Dean glares at her, but most of his attention is occupied by the overgrown humanoid _thing_ in the room. It sits across the room from him, zonked out, on a bed that has sagged so tragically under its weight that the bottom of it is hitting the ground. Easily around eight feet tall, it nevertheless has a tiny, almost sweet man’s head, and peach fuzz all over its crown.

“They never have anything to feed him except the stuff they exhume, you know.”

“What is it, even?”

Deirdre leans against the window, head cocked to one side. “Madam Dorcas’s brother. He’s differently abled. He hates them, though. He wants their intestines for breakfast. It’s their fault, you know. He was a pretty normal dude.”

Dean makes a terrified snort. “I can tell by the snoring.”

“They knocked him out to bring you in here, but he’ll probably eat you when he wakes up.”

Dean stares mournfully at the cuff around his ankle, fettering him to the wall.

“They’re gonna probably kill your brother, you know.”

“Could you maybe stop trying to rub it in, and I don’t know, go drown some cats or something?”

Deirdre smiles—it’s a terrible look on her— and shakes something dangling from her fingers. A key.

“Hey, Short Straw,” she whispers. “Have you killed a _lot_ of monsters?”

“I’ve had my fair share, yeah.”

“Have you killed some real scary ones? Human-looking ones like the Ladies?”

Dean’s just about to lose it. “What’s this, hunter trivia? What do you want?”

“I’ll give you the key,” Deirdre says, quietly. “If you give me a heads-up.”

“A heads-up before what?”

Deirdre rolls her eyes. “Why, you’re going to try and kill the Ladies, aren’t you?”

Dean frowns. “Wait, you—”

“Want those monsters dead, yep. I owe them something, Short Straw. They won’t let me go back home till I’ve repaid. So I’ll give you the key. You let me know before you leash hell on ‘em.”

Across the room, Richard jolts awake. Baby blue eyes find Dean and dilate with black hunger. It growls at the back of its throat, a rumbling thunderous noise that cranks up Dean’s terror.

“Deal,” he gasps, and Deirdre throws him the key. “What do I do about _this?”_

“Toss him something shiny.”

Dean squirms around and produces a few shiny quarters from his pocket. “These?” he asks, but Deirdre’s gone. Richard growls again and makes a tiny lurching motion. “Hey, my man—,” chuffs Dean, throwing a coin in its direction. “No big movements, okay?”

Richard roars at him and Dean nearly loses the plot right there—but then it leans and picks up the coin.

“You like that, huh?” Dean asks, fitting the key into his cuff. “Like that? Here’s one more!”

At an hour and five minutes past six a.m in the old house, Madam Dorcas lights all the lamps, draws all the curtains. In the main room of the house, still staring at the broken remnants of the chandelier is Deirdre, Sparrow, and the mute thing called Dog, and they spread on the floor all sorts of trinkets gathered from all over: from the jewel-bright streets of Samarkand to the souks of Morocco, and two particularly kitschy voodoo dolls right from some poor hag’s backwoods trailer.

Madam Dorcas doesn’t give any of it more than a passing glance. “Why must we play with toys when the Book is _almost_ in our hands?”

“Almost,” Melina says, ever the displeasing. “Not _yet,_ ” and is silenced by a sharp look.

“Those brothers killed the Vaudeville twins, you know,” Deirdre says, antsy. “I could smell it. And what’s the deal with that Monster?”

Madam Dorcas pinches her lips tight. “Will you read, Melina? Read us about _Zushakon_.”

Melina sits down atop a wooden chair and fusses with her skirt, her hair, clears her voice before she cracks open a very old, yellowing book and begins to read. “ _Zul-che-quon, or Zushakon, God of Death to the Matsun tribe in California. Clairvoyant, also cowardly; scrying shows her her enemies. Beautiful to behold to her prey; her breath is ice, she feasts upon offal. She loathes sunlight; she brings with her darkness and the sound of wings. Persons who look upon her directly develop the Sight to see her and the Knowledge she carries in her Book, but must henceforth stay in the night; else gouge their eyes out in the sun. Zul-che-quon rarely parts with her Book, being psychically tethered to it while her physical self remains at her place of summoning. Zul-che-quon can be summoned by the ringing of specially consecrated bells—”_

“Who rung the bells?” interrupts Deirdre.

“Kids!” Sparrow says. “It’s always kids.”

Melina hums in annoyance. “Well. ‘ _Every hundred years Zushakon will hand her Book of Names, to a Faithful. The Faithful must then, in his lifetime, follow the path of the Book, in the service of his master.”_

“Oh, please,” scoffs Deirdre. “Like that boy is a _Faithful._ He’s a hunter. They wouldn’t know magic from roadkill.”

Sparrow laughs. “Wrong place, wrong time?”

“What a dreadfully wrong place for a boy to be, then. A _lifetime_ of servitude, that blows,” Deirdre rasps. “What’s your deal with the Book, though? You said it couldn’t simply be read by anyone.”

“The Book. It’s _knowledge_. In the hands of a mere mortal, it’s nothing but a guide to random entities. In the hands of someone who can command its full power, it’s _powerful._ She never parts with it, now’s our only chance to get it.”

Madam Dorcas stands, irate.

“Imagine knowing all of the universe! There are _bodhisattvas_ that have committed seven births and rebirths just to learn the Book, ascetics who have walked across deserts to learn the black teachings of it—”

“And now there’s a fifteen-year-old boy,” says Deirdre, uncharacteristically morose. She knows a fifteen-year-old kid back home, river-water in his veins. She calls him Sato. When there are hunters sniffing around, he shivers and hides in her hair and she burns with a prickly, bitey love.

Something about Sam Winchester reminds her of him.

“Yes, now there’s a fifteen-year-old boy. But I believe Zushakon is desperate. For centuries she has withered, waiting for a summons, losing her power, fearing _other_ creatures that could hurt her existence. Every creature the boy kills in her name makes her stronger. As the future she writes is made corporeal with blood, the more corporeal she becomes.”

“She’s promised him something.”

Madam Dorcas sniffs. “Of course she has. As though humans do anything without stakes being involved somehow.”

From downstairs sounds bells, quick ringing, and Melina stands up. “That must be Nerissa. They’ve augured our next move.”

Deirdre pops a bright candy in her mouth and then coughs at the taste. It’s like eating a dry whorl of mushrooms. She watches the two ladies disappear down the winding stairs and thinks of how she doesn’t even really like them. Sending her across the country, back and forth, back and forth.

From behind the giant armoire just at the arch leading to a corkscrew staircase upstairs, there’s a sudden scuffling sound. Deirdre thinks she sees a pair of green eyes, fleeting.

“Did you hear that?” Sparrow asks, eyes narrowing in the direction of the armoire.

“Tell me a story,” Deirdre says, dragging nails down his arm.

Sparrow doesn’t look at her, instead peering at the arch. “I heard something. Is it the elder boy?”

“Don’t be silly, he’s with Richard. Tell me a story, Sparrow, or I’ll bite you.”

“Which story?”

“Tell me the one about the man who sold heads at Central Street for ten dollars apiece.”

“The FBI got to him.”

“It’s a good story anyways. Very mercantile.”

Sparrow frowns once more at the arch and turns back to Deirdre, opening his mouth, and she smiles at his ice-cream voice and tall tales and wonders if there’ll be enough warning and enough time for her to get out.

Words ring in Dean’s head as he makes his way around the arch and past the errand-runners, hardly daring to breathe. _Lifetime,_ he thinks. _LIFETIME._ Did Sam know that? Something about the way he’d looked at Dean earlier when he’d called out to the Monster told him he did.

A freaking _lifetime._ Not to mention they were making her stronger by killing things her way.

The basement of the house is hung with bright lights, at odds to the rest of the house. In the far corner of the room is a table with a cadaver on it. Nerissa and Imogene bicker over which parts of the body are which. Sam is tied to a chair closer to the door, head hanging forward and hair in his eyes, but he doesn’t look hurt in any way. Dean breathes a sigh.

“Really, Imogene— _that’s_ the duodenum. _This_ is the jejunum.”

“ _Sam,”_ Dean hisses, and when Sam doesn’t look up, he knocks lightly on the wood— _thrice and mind the gaps—_ and is rewarded when Sam jerks his head up, very alert. _Oh good._ He puts his pen-knife on the floor and kicks it lightly towards Sam, who secures it between his sneakers.

“Well, what does it _say?”_ demands Madam Dorcas. “How do we kill the boy _and_ read the Book?”

Sam pulls one foot out of his shoe, grasping the knife between his toes.

“You could take his eye and use that...” Nerissa hums, leaning over the cadaver, poking at its guts. “Or _both_ eyes. I see a symbol; it must be Parsee. Ah, there’s a ritual—”

“A Parsee ritual, yes, using _eyes_ —”

Sam looks at Dean in horror.

The whole house shakes in a sudden earthquake.

“Richard must still be hungry,” frowns Imogene. “Hmm.”

Dean backs slowly out of the room, breathing in quick sharp bursts. Then, when he’s sure he’s out of earshot, he runs, back up the stairs and slowing at the landing, then slinking past the errand-runners who are now drinking some pale green stuff out of tall milk bottles. He goes up the corkscrew staircase, reaches the next landing, and pauses in front of Richard’s door.

“Hey, uh,” he says. “I’m—I’m gonna let you out, okay?”

Richard growls, making all of Dean’s hair stand up on edge, but he’s already picking the lock, throwing the door open. He doesn’t wait to see if the monster understands before running the hell down the staircase. Sure enough, the moment he reaches the first-floor landing, the creature barrels out of the room and down the stairs that collapses immediately under his weight.

White plaster and dust explodes, fragments of brick and stone raining all around him, and Dean throws himself behind the armoire as the thing rampages through the antechamber. He holds his arms over his head till the shaking lessens somewhat, screwing his eyes tight against the detritus raining down. Sparrow shrieks and throws himself under a sofa. The girl, Deirdre, is nowhere to be seen. The noise is enough warning for her, then.

From downstairs he hears the ladies exclaim, and with a sickening jolt, Dean realizes that he can’t let Richard run down to the basement, not yet, not if Sam’s got to make his way out.

“Hey! Hey, man, look here!” Dean says, grabbing a big kaleidoscopic lamp off a shelf. “Look here! Shiny!”

Richard growls and moves towards him, and Dean throws the lamp in the opposite direction from the basement, towards the corridors at the other end, heaving half a sigh when the monster lurches in that direction.

“What have you _done?”_ wails Nerissa from behind him, and she’s got an ancient revolver, huge in her grasp.

She pulls the trigger and Dean flinches, caught sudden and helpless in the crosshairs, but the gun only clicks. Wounded by this betrayal, Nerissa tries again, _CLICK—_ and she screams, hateful—

 _Third time’s the charm,_ Dean thinks, hysterically, just as the gun explodes in her hand and shrapnel takes her down.

His knees nearly give out from the relief, but then Madam Dorcas and Imogene are here, gaping, their hair white from settling plaster. Dean uses their sudden shock of seeing Nerissa to dart around them and near where the stairs are, where Sam basically throws himself at Dean, the weird canine-toothed girl flying into the embrace with him, and all three of them crash to the ground.

“Get the fuck off!” Sam yells, kicking manically to dislodge her teeth around his ankle, “Argh, Dean, don’t _pull!”_

Right. No, of course not.

Sam grabs at a table leg and the whole table falls, scattering glass and round pebbles and a weird-looking dead cat with a flower vase on its head. Dean picks it up and lobs it, right at Melina’s head. Sam pulls his leg back, scrambling against Dean, wide-eyed.

“Gotta get out. Right now,” whispers Dean, and Sam nods, gasping for breath.

Dean barely notices Madam Dorcas trying to distract Richard with a gleaming gold Laughing Buddha as they run through the antechamber, and will swear, in any court of law in any universe, that sunlight and fresh air never seems as bloody good as when they burst through the doors and into the sticky magnolia garden.

“Stop. Sam,” Dean says, coughing, and they’re not out of the garden yet, not out of the house, and Sam is scrabbling in his pockets for his sunglasses. “You’re bleeding.”

And so Sam is. He’s also lost a shoe.

“Uh, yeah,” Sam stares down for a second before he turns his gaze to something else, just past the marble angels and somewhere in the tangle of Spanish moss. “Shit, what’s going to happen to Richard? We can’t leave yet.”

 _Okay,_ thinks Dean vaguely, something breaking in him. _That’s it._

“Does that _thing_ say we can’t?” Dean spits, wild impotent rage at a monster he can’t see. “Are you going to follow it till the end of time? _Because that’s the deal with that creature, Sam._ I heard those ladies say it.Do you even know _what_ it is? Don’t give me a half-assed answer!”

“I don’t know,” Sam says, but for once it’s sunshine, you can’t lie to your brother in the sunshine, and Dean can see the lie. It thickens the rage inside of him, until he thinks he’ll either explode or hit Sam or both.

“You _knew._ Did you know all along? _Sam!_ ”

For a moment Sam meets his eyes, a hunted, terrified expression on his face, but then it’s gone and he’s looking at the ground. Sam’s voice is horribly small when he answers.

“Yeah. Okay, yeah, I knew. I knew what it was, it told me.”

“Fuck you,” Dean grabs his brother’s shirt. “Give me the Book. We’re putting a stop to this.”

Sam looks at him flatly. “No.”

“Give me the Book or I’ll walk away now, I _swear,_ Sam! I’ll walk till I find how to kill this thing, and I’ll find it, and you can deal with the thing alone till then! _”_

“You _can’t,”_ Sam mutters. “You can’t walk away, Dean.”

And it’s like everything they’ve been doing, everything that’s been strange and out of proportion and off-kilter for all these days, all of that rushes up at Dean and overwhelms him. He shakes Sam, hard, wishes he’d break.

“You told me it’d give Dad back if we did what it said! _You told me it was a deal!_ Do you know what that thing wants? It wants to get stronger on every critter _we_ kill for it. It’s playing with us! So God help me if I stay doing what it wants for one more second– _”_

“ _You can’t leave!”_ Sam shouts at him.

“Well, yeah, stop me,” Dean hisses. “I should never have agreed to this. I know better. I shoulda just found a way to kill the thing instead of playing games with it, wasting time—”

“ _Wasting time!_ ” Sam howls, anguished, and shoves Dean. Then his lips curl in a sneer and he delivers the blow with a crazed half-smile. “It never said it was gonna give Dad back, okay? I m-made that up. I made that up so you’d—you’d come with me.”

And the sudden, swelling rage in Dean; infuriated howl that either threatens to break his bones or spill out, and he lets it spill out, lunging at Sam, and they both go crashing into the mess of cobblestones and potted plants and gravel, fists flying.

Dean barks as Sam catches him full across the jaw.

Dean is fucking speechless. They both are. Suddenly it’s a mad scramble to dodge blows. Dean has the advantage of weight and muscle, but Sam, Sam and his freaking _teeth_ and his sharp bones, and his quickness that comes from training since he outgrew diapers—

They roll, tangled limbs and hurt, half-sobs and dirty fighting.

Dean manages to pin his brother, seizing his wrist and pushing a forearm against his chest, keeping him down. Sam gasps raggedly, struggling to get free. There’s a moment of sickening triumph as Dean thinks Sam looks as wretched as he feels, grass-stained and dirty, his lip split and his eyes gone wild.

And then Dean’s vision goes momentarily black. He grunts at the elbow to his ribs, throws an uncoordinated punch that Sam feints to the left, but manages to get Sam in a headlock. Dean breathes harsh and wrecked, skin burning, pulse skyrocketing and adrenaline rushing in his blood. Their eyes meet: the visual connection thrumming with anger, unsaid things, desperation. Then Sam gets a knee over Dean and they roll again, Dean huffing and breaking the headlock, lashing out with one hand anyway and knocking Sam off.

“You—” Sam gasps, a sudden furious horror-show of a smile brightening his face. “You don’t—you don’t understand! _It was going to kill you._ When I came into the church, it was going to rip—you—open!”

This last is delivered in a half-scream, and momentarily stunned, Dean stops moving.

“I only did it for you, Dean!” Sam says, something guttural in his voice, broken and animalistic, as if he can’t figure out the right way to convey this seething dismay. “It would have killed you if I hadn’t, so don’t you _dare_ act like I was wasting your time. Don’t you dare do that!”

Dean backs up, trying to grab hold of Sam, but Sam is still furious, spots of colour flaming across his cheeks, this wild thing that crushes Dean’s heart in shame and pride and fury and love.

“And I know I fucked up, I know this is _stupid_ , I know! I don’t know how to get Dad back, _oh God I don’t,_ I don’t know if that thing ate him, or what, I don’t, but—it was _you_ and that thing—that thing was going to—and I didn’t want to tell you because I was ashamed, I should have done something, _anything_ else—but you’d try and go after it if you knew about _Dad_ —and you’re the _only_ one I—”

And through this all, he’s still fighting Dean, punctuating each fragment with jabs that Dean blocks, until Dean finally just scoops him into an embrace, fists and all. His head is screaming, and his body screams too, limbs exhausted, knuckles burning, heart thumping. There is a heady rush in his brain, a drumming, like being in the belly of some large beast whirling wingless, and the name of that beast is pain or love or both, and he doesn’t even know why he shuts Sam up by kissing his mouth, hard, clumsily, a disaster of teeth and skin.

Into the flushed, flabbergasted, breathy silence that follows, Dean says, inadequately, shakily, “Okay. Okay.”

If there’s one thing Winchester men have in common, it’s a tragic lack of oratory.

Sam just gapes at him, eyes huge, full of that crackly, delirious intensity he gets after a sparring session. But there’s something else there too, questioning, and Dean swallows, wishes the ground would just open up and swallow him already.

“Okay—I didn’t really mean to do that, exactly—”

“ _Okay_?” Sam growls, shaking still, his fingers curling around Dean’s jacket. “Okay? That’s what you’re gonna go with, asshole?”

There’s no heat to the insult; just the salt-tang of exhaustion, an expulsion of hot breath that Dean can feel through his shirt, a half-laugh, half-sob.

Dean lets go of him, and Sam’s eyes scan him, hooded and heavy, his breath still coming in huge gasps. They stare at each other. Dean thinks, H _ow am I supposed to?_ He can’t find the rest of the thought. _How am I supposed to make all this right? How am I supposed to make us less fucked up?_ His pulse slows; and so do his breaths. It seems forever later when the clench in his throat eases.

“You’re...I don’t know what to say, man. Everything I have sounds like half-assed poetry,” Dean says. His fingers open, close. “I wasn’t ever going to really leave, I’ll tell you that. I couldn’t. Not without you. I’ll find you wherever you go, but I won’t leave.”

Dean pauses, draws in a shallow breath. Thinks up a tide-and-moon analogy and wonders where these kind of things spout endlessly from. He smiles, bright, like he’s showing Sam something awesome. _Look, the giant ball of twine. Look, the_ other _giant ball of twine._ “There. I said it. That’ll totally give the Backstreet Boys a run for their money, huh?”

Sam looks at him, as though trying to sort out something in his mind, fish out a conclusion, make something compute. Struggle abandoned, he huffs and asks, “Are we...okay?”

Loud crashes from the house at the end of the driveway. A rush of wind rustles through the trees, bringing with it the acrid tang of smoke, and there is suddenly fire in the windows, long tongues of it.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and thinks _I have no fucking idea_. “Yeah. We will be.”

“What do we do?”

“Get outta here first. The more distance between us and those crazy witches, the better I’ll breathe.”

Only just nine and already a hundred degrees hot as they push through the back gate, fire-engines sounding in the distance. At the end of a road framed with sentinel-like cypresses, Deirdre sits on the hood of the Oldsmobile. Sunlight glints off her pale skin and somehow makes her look even more washed out.

“Hey, look, it’s Disneyland and Short Straw!” she says, fake-bright, and scowls. “Are you two done rolling around on the ground in the manner of undignified mongrel pups?”

Sam throws her a guarded look. “Yeah, why do you care?”

Deirdre shrugs.. “I’m gonna take the nasty old man’s car before he shows up alive. Drive to Woonsocket. You got a plan?”

“Ugh...”

“No, ‘course not. All you accomplish are bruises. My advice? Get a plan,” Deirdre says, throwing a slim green book at Sam, the same one they all were reading back in the main room of the house. She squints at a spot a few feet to Sam’s left, near the gate, and points a finger. “You’ve an ugly mug. Zul-che-quon or whatever the hell your name is. Damn ugly.”

“Don’t bait it,” Sam mutters.

Dean frowns. “Does it speak English? I find it strange that it speaks English.”

“Yeah, that’s all that’s strange about it, Short Straw.” scoffs Deirdre, going around to the driver’s side door. “You need to get out of the sun. There’s a nice yellow house up the street that’s empty for the month. Big iron gates. If something from the pool asks, just tell them I sent you.”

“If something from the pool—?”

Deirdre slams her door shut. “Oh, don’t be so fucking _human._ It’s hateful.”

“Man, our lives are freaking strange,” mumbles Dean, shaking his head and tugging Sam up the street, looking for the yellow house with the big iron gates and things in the pool.

 

 

 

 

 

**PART FOUR**

Sam dreams of big toothy things watching him while he sits in a cage, but then he wakes up, face pressed into the world’s largest musty-smelling yellow couch. He rolls over and blinks blearily at Dean’s face. Dean’s eyes are huge and owlish in the dark, and he needs a shave. He looks a bit of a maverick with his scruff, a bit Indiana Jones. Not that Sam would ever tell him that.

Sam’s heart gives a helpless happy bounce and he doesn’t even know why.

“So, it kinda lives, um, v-vicariously through you, is what I gather.” Dean whispers. “From the book.”

Sam pushes himself up on his elbows and looks around. It’s still the house they B&E’d last night then.

“What does that mean?”

“Means it uses you to kill its enemies, see the world and stuff, but it’s actually physically not here.”

“No?”

“Nah. It’s psychically tethered to the Book, and you’re the only one who can read the Book. That’s why I can’t see it. That’s why you need rabbit eyes to see it. It probably sees _through_ you, like it’d be blind without you. It’s not like a wendigo or a rugaru or a shifter, it isn’t _physical._ This book says it remains tethered to its place of summoning, gorging itself on easy humans, never really leaving. It says it eats a few people, then stores the rest of them for later, as digestion permits.”

A half-snort breaks out of Sam, surprising him, “It says that? As digestion permits?”

“Tragically.”

“Huh.”

Dean’s eyes go big and bright, too huge for his face. “So maybe we can still save Dad.”

 _Maybe,_ thinks Sam, and clenches his fists so hard he wonders why his bones don’t snap.

“If-if we go back,” says Sam, wondering if this will lead to a fight too. He tests his arms and winces a bit, thinks, _I’m one big bruise._ “It’ll kill you. It said that.”

“We’ll just have to work our way around that problem then.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet, Sammy. But this is just another monster, and we’ll figure it out!”

Often, Dean says things that he only wishes were true, as though getting the words out would make it so, magically bring them to life the way thought-forms and tulpas are. _We’ll be fine_ is prime amongst them, _Dad’s always right_ comes close, and now here it is, that same grin and sureness that Sam files under wishful thinking, his brother saying things because he wants _, needs_ them to be true.

It’s what liars and misguided optimists and big brothers do.

“I mean it.” Dean says, quietly. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah.” Sam crawls off the couch and lands on his knees on the floor before straightening up.

“Hey,” Dean calls, unwillingly, as Sam reaches the door to the kitchen. “About yesterday—”

Something leaps in Sam’s chest and he thinks his ears are about to burst into flame. “No, Dean—never mind—we don’t have to actually talk about—”

Dean sounds terribly relieved. “Yeah, okay, I’m just saying—it was just a weird moment—you know what I’m saying, right?”

Sam groans and flees, vaguely horrified that his stupid face is stuck on a smile.

They spend the day watching cartoons, which is the only thing they _can_ watch because the rest of the channels are child-locked. It’s kind of ridiculous with Dean grumping and grousing that he’s too freaking old for this, and that there’s no beer in this stupid house, but it’s also oddly peaceful. Sam hobbles in and out of the room with his bitten ankle and bruised ribs, oscillating between the kitchen and its veritable supply of Milk Duds and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and the TV room with _The Roadrunner_ _Show_ that seems to entertain Dean so greatly that he makes absent roadrunner sounds during the commercials.

Sam gets steadily dazed on sugar and normality and thinks he sees giant toothy things looking in through the window at times, exactly like in his dream, but they seem friendly so he doesn’t tell Dean.

“We should get more of this stuff,” Sam says, when he’s made it halfway through a Trix box. He picks out all the yellow ones and gives them to Dean because he doesn’t like the lemony taste. “We never get any candy. Less ammo, more candy.”

Dean is intently focussed on Scooby Doo now. He’s slouching on the couch with his feet up on the tea table and his hair sticking up in soft, wrecked spikes. There’s a mummy on the TV running around blindfolded, and from where Sam is sitting, on the other side of the couch, he can see it reflected on Dean’s eyes. Tripping and falling, falling and tripping, like it’s at the bottom of a green ocean.

He has no idea what’s going on in his head today.

“Are you listening?” he asks, nudging Dean with his foot.

Dean is very absorbed in watching the mummy. “I’m thinking.”

“You’re ogling at Daphne.”

“Shut up, Sam.”

“Or Fred.”

The candy bar that hits Sam smack on the forehead is still worth it.

The blindfolded mummy runs into a room and is tricked into falling down a hatch. There are alligators snapping in a pool below, and it grabs hold of the scuttle, kicking its unwinding legs. Sam pushes away the Trix box and yawns, wishing the sun would go down so they can get out.

He doesn’t know when he falls asleep, but when he comes to, it’s dark outside and Dean is leaning in front of him. His hand is on Sam’s shoulder: he must have shook Sam awake.

There’s a moment while they just look at each other in the semi-darkness, something strange and new and weird between them. Sam knows there are gears turning in Dean’s head, excited energy pouring off him in waves. His eyes glint in the dark, a fiery flicker.

“You trust me on this, ‘kay, Sammy?”

“What? Dean, why- what are you doing?”

Dean has a fistful of Sam’s shirt in his grasp, and he leans closer. The horned creature on Dean’s amulet knocks against Sam’s chest. “Okay, don’t freak out.”

“I’m—why’re you blindfolding me?”

Dean’s fingers brush the back of his head, tying up the knot. “So it can’t see where we’re going.”

“ _What?_ W-where are we going?” stutters Sam, reaching out to find Dean in the new dark.

“I can’t tell you that, right,” Dean whispers. “We’re gonna con this thing.”

“Dean, it’ll—”

Dean’s voice is scoured and raw, hopeful. “The thing’s not really here, right? It can’t do anything to us right now. It can’t see.”

“I can’t see either.”

“But you’ve got me.”

Yeah, Sam thinks, you can’t really say anything to that.

Well, except for: “You watch too many damn soap operas, Dean.”

“You wound me with your pathetic comebacks, Sammy,” Dean says, squeezing Sam’s shoulder.

Sam reels at a sudden thought. “We don’t—Dean, we don’t have any weapons. Our bags are back at that creepy house.”

It’s quiet for a minute and Sam wonders if Dean is looking at him. There’s a fuzzy flush of self-consciousness at the thought. But then Sam is on his feet and they’re moving, careening a little like people in a three-legged race.

“Yeah, don’t worry about that, I got that covered.”

 _You’re probably lying_ , thinks Sam, biting his lip. _You’re a lying liar who lies._

It terrifies him how suddenly that doesn’t seem to matter.

Sam holds onto Dean and tries not to think about how this will all probably get them killed. But then, he thinks woefully, that’s the nature of a quest. You stand up to a great beast and endure trials. You hold your breath and hope your palms don’t sweat _too_ much; so much that you’ll drop your sword. There is a treasure at the end—a woman or a sword or a brother—or certain death. But by nature, quests—they have to end. They’re temporary. Like mothers and fathers. (Unlike brothers.)

They have to end.

The drive back to Roxboro is mostly quiet; the Monte Carlo that Dean stole does not have a radio.

Sam puts his head against the window and reports that the Monster is pissed, that it’s yelling, that it wants to know what they’re doing—but Dean grits his teeth and keeps driving.

“We’re ending this today.”

“Okay,” mumbles Sam, and he’s probably terrified, fingers restless on his knees.

They reach and bypass Roxboro with its car washes and barbecue shacks and the motel with the room that’s still theirs. Heading further to Samora, there’s a faint tinge of orange radiance at the edges of the horizon by the time Lake Hyco creeps into the windshield. Dean sees the power plant on the other side, lit up green and white, some great silver beast with its chugging pipes and glittering towers, curling spires like monster-castles in Sam’s old illustrated fairytales book.

“Gotta rescue the princess,” he mutters, and chortles a little. There’s a sudden phantom pain in his ears as he imagines getting them boxed by Dad for even thinking that. It’s funny in a twisted, panicky way.

Dean makes the turn at the dirt-road that leads, past grassy pastures and weirdly huge wildflowers, to a hill and the church.

There’s this weird squeezing in his heart, and the sudden silence of the engine startles him as if he had nothing to do with it. Dean sits and thrums his fingers against the wheel for a few seconds, making a little rumbling noise in his throat, watching Sam who fell asleep God knows how many miles ago. Sam’s face is against the window and his breath fogs up the same patch of glass again and again.

Dean feels weird and buzzed and dizzy like he’s watching this all from afar, watching them perform, and he can’t deal with shaking Sam awake right now. He settles for slamming the door shut as loud as he can as he gets out. Predictably, Sam jerks and slams his forehead against the glass and goes scrabbling at the blindfold with dream-dazzled fingers.

“In a minute, pal,” Dean says, opening the passenger side door and grabbing at Sam’s hands. “Got a monster to kill, remember?”

He watches the shape of Sam’s mouth go from vaguely surprised to despondent.

“Dean—it’s plenty physical at the church—the monster, I mean.”

Dean leans with his arms on the top of the door, vague panic beginning to flutter in his chest. “I know.”

“Yeah, we—what’re we gonna do? You—” voice scraped and raw, rush of breath, and Dean wonders if it’s chaos in Sam’s head: all crippled fragments of words swimming around.

“I got a plan.” Dean mutters, holding onto this like it’s an anchor holding him above the water. “We’ll go up to the door together, but then you’ve got to distract it.”

“ _Distract_ it?” Sam’s voice probably hits a whole new, never-before-heard register. “How the hell do I—?”

“Uhh...run away or something. Hopefully, it’ll see you and realize we’ve tricked it by coming back here.” Dean says, and winces at Sam’s horrified expression. “Just—buy me a bit of time.”

Sam’s got his fingers curled into the seat cover of the car like he’s holding on for dear life. He’s silent for the longest time, breathing uneven, sucking in one cheek like he’s biting on it. He looks about ten years old, and Dean’s heart does that staggering, clenching thing again.

“Look, I know it’s weak, but we’ve to—”

“Okay. I get it, let’s go.”

“Sammy?”

“I can do it, Dean.”

Dean threads his fingers through Sam’s hair, feeling weirdly and entirely endeared to his brother at the moment. It’s something to do with the crazy power-plant hum in the air and the gigantic stars in the rapidly thinning night and mortal fear like whoa.

“Yeah, I know you can.”

The clouds are curling up, turning slightly red at the corners. From here, the church looks innocuous and almost bored with itself and all its drama, slumping perceptibly to the left with plants strangling its walls. _This is it,_ thinks Dean, the thought lit up like a bare bulb swinging in the recesses of his mind. All his constants—Dad, the Impala, their stuff, everything except for Sam— are lost, bobbing around in the ocean of somewhere-else, the flotsam of this all-encompassing, unbearable case, and this is their only chance to end it.

Dean grabs the giant garbage bag of stuff he’d stolen from the yellow house from the back of the Monte Carlo and guides them both towards the church.

 _This is it_.

Sam hopes, sincerely, that Dean has a better plan than what he lets on. But for now, he’ll go along with what Dean says, because the logic of it is simple: Sam doesn’t want to be alone, without Dean. It’s a larval understanding, something he was born with. Sam figures, he’ll fight ghosts or monsters or headless cannibals or whatever, just so he can save Dean for himself.

He doesn’t know how close to the church they are, but he can see it all in his head. The crumbling steps and the broken padlock on the door, the giant hole in the ceiling, the summoning circle, the scrying bowl and the bells. The shadows pooling at the corners, slinking about in various animal and human shapes.

One of them had moved towards him when he went in, leaning like it was fighting to break out of its shadow-skin, the spot where its mouth should be opening in a shout or a scream. The silhouette had looked vaguely familiar.

( _Dad?_ Sam remembers thinking.)

Sam wonders now if that was the monster’s reserve-pool, if killing it would free all the shadows, if they’d end up in a church full of confused animals and people.

The last time Sam had gone in, the Monster was but a shadow, leaning over an unconscious Dean, and all the breath had rushed out of Sam like a punch in the gut. He’d shot at the thing like crazy, but it just seemed to absorb bullets. It turned to him and spat them all out of the little holes they’d made, leaning from a great height to offer Sam a blobby hand full of silver bullets.

 _I’ve heard so many stories,_ it said in his head, a low rumble that sent shivers up his spine. _And now here you are, boy._

It stood up straight and the bullets rained around Sam, tinkling fatal rain. He heard it stretch, invisible spine cracking with invisible bones, and a deep terror sprang up somewhere in his belly.

 _This was too big_ , he knew immediately. Even for Dad, this was too big.

_They all know your name, anything that matters. They all know._

Which, okay, whatever. “Yeah?” Sam countered, falling back on sarcasm, typical Dean thing to do when you’re facing something bigger than you can handle or a blow you know you won’t be able to feint. “Bet _you_ don’t, then.”

It laughed. _They squawk about you, Sam Winchester, the things you hunt. They know you. You’re smaller than I thought. Tiny bones. Your brother is bigger. I’ll keep him. Do you want to watch me fillet him?_

Sam sent up the standard prayer, _please,_ to no one in particular. The shadow-monster brought up a large hand, and Sam winced as it cut a thin line up his arm. The red smear of his blood turned black in its claws.

_I want to know if it is true._

“If what’s true?”

_What they all say about you._

“Look, I—we’ll go away, we’ll leave you alone, we won’t come back ever again, just, please,” babbled Sam, looking at Dean’s prone form, at the creamy moonlight swirling manically through the hole in the ceiling, at the scrying bowl glittering on the table. Through the windows at the back, he glimpsed headlights on the road, wished someone would come. Weirdly enough, the headlights got closer, and now he could hear music, _Red Right Hand_ through tinny car speakers, loud laughing.

The Monster swooped to shut the doors, snarling. Sam ran over to Dean, dropping to his knees beside him. Dean was breathing fine, just totally conked out, his lashes barely fluttering. Sam stood up again, and went over to the table.

 _Break the altar,_ he thought vaguely, pushing at it with all his might.

The scrying bowl fell, swirling water and some strange silvery dish crashing to the floor. Something softer, something wrapped in a bundle fell too, rolling close to Dean’s feet. Sam leaned to pick it up, reflexively, and he’d barely got a glimpse of it—something like a book—before the Monster was back, screeching, _what did you do, what did you DO_ and Sam slammed into the wall, his head ringing. He felt it rush him, stretching itself tall, and something was wrong with his eyes; they itched when he looked at the thing. But it was grabbing at his chin with insubstantial hands, dragging him off the floor, flinging him towards the shadow things in the corner.

 

Then they were all over him, grasping and tugging, taunting, singing whispered hymns in his ear. _Hullo, hullo, hullo Sam._

“Dean!” he yelled, uselessly. The things were trying to bite him, but they had no teeth. Instead, he felt them leave creepy black trails of ectoplasm behind, spooky saliva.

The ceiling of the church spun, and the big monster swooped about in his vision, laughing and watching, and Sam had a sudden, horrible thought that this thing was _forever_ , this thing has seen every sunrise since Creation, this thing has cackled and killed and jumped out of cracks since before mankind.

It came to rest beside him, finally, too close. Sam grabbed at his eyes, fighting the urge to gouge them out.

_Let me tell you a story._

The shadows flattened and sluiced away. Stunned, Sam stopped fighting. And the Monster told him a story all night—stretching in timeline from the primordial grey seas and spread out all over history, a story of Books and quests and monsters, of what it promised in return: knowledge, purpose.

_I’ll promise you your brother. Will you take the Book, Sam Winchester?_

“Sammy? Are you listening to me?”

Dean gives his shoulder a little shake and Sam shudders, autonomic, crashing back to reality and reaching out blindly to grasp at his brother.

“S-sorry. You were sayin’?”

“We’re here.”

“Oh.”

And he can feel it. The quiet delirium of the shadows in the church, the stark heavy whine of the giant shadow thing that he now knows is the Monster in all its physicality. It seems stronger now, fed on their kills and quests, _bigger_.A cold cube of fear melts into a flood somewhere inside him and Sam can sense it now: the stupid blind bit of the Monster that’s attached to him trying to put together the facts.

It’s angry; he can feel it, he chokes on it. _Body,_ he hears it think, sensing the more solid part of itself behind the doors. _Back. Here._

It’s like a blanket is being lifted off him and he feels the nagging, icy presence of the thing that’s followed them all this time detach itself from him, drawn like a fly towards its own body.

“Dean—” he starts.

The doors open with a sound like a thunderclap, and Dean stumbles and knocks an elbow into Sam’s chest. Sam hisses in pain but grabs for the elbow, orienting himself by his staggering brother.

“Man, I did not expect that. The thing’s rolling out the red carpet welcome.”

As though hearing Dean, the whole place starts shaking. The steps they’re standing on start to give a bit, and the creaking-crunching-shrieking noise gets louder and louder. Sam feels warm-blooded and ridiculous, standing blind at the threshold to this gloomy quaking hell.

“Get it off!” Dean yells, and Sam wonders wildly what he’s on about, but only for a moment before Dean’s yanking the blindfold from his eyes. The inside of the church is a maelstrom: ink-black shadows and dark liquid running all over the walls, splintered wood from long broken pews gathered up and being spat into every corner. Stone and dust rains from the ceiling, and the abalone Mary at the altar starts to shake.

Sam sees the Monster for one instant: coiling into a shape back behind all the other shadows, less shadow than them now. A ridged, bony spine and bandy hind legs, six tattered wings, and gnarled fingers gripping the lectern as it drags itself to full height. Its face flickers kaleidoscopically as it turns towards them.

 _Crap,_ thinks Sam fuzzily, _this is what we fed._

“Jesus,” mutters Dean. It stumbles to its scrying bowl and must see _them_ there now, must see Sam and Dean as her newest enemies because it looks straight up, amber eyes on them.

A catatonic sense of calm takes over Sam, his blood gone sluggish—but only for a moment. In the next instant, he’s electric, something kicking in, maybe years of Winchester breeding all tangled together with the way Dean is looking at the Monster as wide-eyed and open-mouthed as Sam had been.

“Go.” He says, jabbing at Dean’s spine to startle him out of the coma. “Dean—go, you’ve to get inside!”

The Monster rises, fluorescence crackling along its spine like Christmas lights. It rushes towards them and Sam runs, knowing the Monster will follow, screeching at this betrayal.

Down the path to the church and then a right through a field of overgrown grass that swishes around him like snakes. Everything collides into a sensory blur of stumbles and leaps, the moan of the wind and the hum of the power plant, the earworm of the Monster’s enraged shrieking.

_You go where the Book leads you—that was our deal!_

Sam throws a look over his shoulder and the thing is just seconds away from catching him. His leg twists and he goes down, hissing in pain. Icy cold spreads from his toes and seizes the muscles in his calf, and the horrid kills of the Monster flash postcard-bright in his eyes. Evisceration, freezing. He drags himself to his feet and some freak adrenaline rush propels him forward again.

Up on the hill is an old tree, overlooking soft pasture lands that roll right into Lake Hyco. The branches spread dark as ink-spill against soft predawn. There are still stars in the sky, whole galactic herds of them. Sam stumbles towards the tree, gasping. He drops to his knees beside the tree, ice in his blood, pain splintering behind his eyes at the faint sunlight.

 _Tricks!_ screeches Zushakon, and he turns his head to look right at it. White eyeballs with no pupils, and a face that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. _How come they all say it’s beautiful?_ he thinks, and slips the knife out of his jeans pocket.

 _No more,_ yells Zushakon, and Sam raises his knife, not sure what good that’s going to do. It gazes at him, and then its features shift, something soft and warm pouring through the ugliness, hairless head sprouting bright gold, lipless mouth blooming red. Skin ripples brown-white over bleached grey-green bones, and then it’s standing before him, cruel and cold and beautiful in the way that makes you want to cry.

“Do you believe in angels?” Zushakon asks him, merciless.

Sam can’t look at her—it’s very much a her now—she’s too bright and his eyes itch. But the glaring light somehow twists around his heart and sucks away the fear. Why was he running at all? He thinks of answering, but smiles instead.

“Do you?” Zushakon asks again, and she’s too close now—he should be doing something instead of just watching her.

God, the stars are large behind her. Dean stole a book from some library once, and it had all these facts about stars that glowed in the dark. That’s why he stole it, of course. That afternoon, they’d made a little dark tent with scratchy motel-room blankets to gape at it. Dean wasn’t going to actually read it or anything, but he got hooked on the part about constellations, and now he can find Big Dipper anywhere. Sam finds that comforting, that no matter how lost they are on the ground, the map of the heavens remain more or less the same. Dean can read it, orient them. Dean’s like a compass.

 _Dean,_ he thinks.

“You’re not an angel,” Sam informs the Monster, slowly. He drags his gaze away from her with great effort. He closes his eyes. “You’re a parasite.”

Sam can feel her swoop down on him then, taloned and affronted, teeth rippling in hatred. He backs up against the tree, bark rough against his back, his spine locking straight in expectation. He can feel her, the scything of the air around her as she moves, and his brain goes crazy, grasping uselessly at the knife and hacking at her twisting form— because what good, _what good will that do,_ and he can feel the cold in his bones, this is how she kills, he can _feel_ —

—and then he _can’t._

He opens his eyes, hardly daring.

_Nothing._

Down by the bottom of the hill, the church doors close with an almighty bang.

The shadows in the church wail at Dean Winchester.

 _Save, save us,_ some whisper. Others are stranger, humming and grabby, leaving black slime on his skin where they tug and press at him.

“Shut up!” he yells, throwing the Book on the altar, emptying the garbage bag of varied items on the floor. _Bad move,_ he thinks a moment later, when one of the shadows makes off with his book of matches.

“Give that back!”

It laughs, and he can see the matchbox hovering teasingly in the air. _Come-come-get it,_ sounds some whispers. The others wail harder, _give it ba-a-a-ck,_ and a scuffle breaks out. Dean grits his teeth and thinks _hold on, Sammy,_ and jumps right into the melee, emerging victorious twenty seconds later, spitting black and dizzy.

He scrambles for the bathroom mirror he’d filched from the yellow house, cursing steadily at the shadows trying to bring him down, and drops it into the scrying bowl.

Then it’s cooking oil for the Book, a spray of salt just to be safe, a match flickering green in the dark of the church: sure recipe for disaster.

He throws himself into the darkness formed by a pile of broken pews, watching as the Book of Names burns, fire licking sluggish along its sides.

A second passes. Ten.

“Come on,” Dean mutters, willing the Monster to come whooshing back into the church. “Come _on_ , dammit.”

 _What if,_ he thinks, blood going cold, but then it’s here—before Dean can even complete the thought. It swoops into the church and the doors bang shut behind it.

He hears its enraged howl, its fingers scrabbling to try and save the Book.

 _I’ll kill your brother first!_ It growls, the voice a sonic blast in his head. _I’ll kill your brother and I’ll make you watch and then I’ll KILL YOU._

Dean grips his knife tighter, wishing it were a gun, a rifle, anything that meant he didn’t have to get any closer to it. He watches its head whip around from side to side, searching for him, the enemy that burned its precious Book, and then it’s moving to the scrying bowl.

“You ain’t gonna find me _._ ”Dean murmurs.

The Monster’s head dips low as it stares at the bowl, at the mirror in the bowl, at the face of the newest enemy. It blinks confused, pupil-less eyes at itself. It gapes, paralyzed.

Dean slides himself out of his hiding position, hardly daring to breathe as he sneaks up behind the Monster. _Bye-bye,_ he thinks, and buries his knife right through its knobby spine. The resistance against the momentum of his thrust is sickening, and he twists the knife to get it right through.

A sudden, cold spray of blood right in his face, and he gasps. He retreats backwards, closer to the door. The Monster continues to puzzle at the scrying bowl, pulling the knife out simply as if it were a toothpick, sighing at the spatter of its blood onto the floor.

_I don’t understand._

It swirls the bloody knife in the bowl and looks terribly depressed. It tries tasting the ruddy water.

“That is just wrong town.” murmurs Dean, dismayed, ready to bolt now—but then the doors slam open, sunlight spilling through in giddy violence; more, much _more_ than the diffused bit that makes it through the hole in the ceiling.

Sunlight like a punch, like a dizzy drink of water, and the Monster gets it full in the face. Unmoving as it is, staring at the bowl still, it just takes it.

Dean whirls to grab Sam, Sam with his eyes streaming and red from him rubbing at them, backing a bit away from the doorway and two steps down.

“What- what’s happening to it?”

The Monster is burning. The light breaks it apart into a sudden shower of bright sparks, each like drops of liquid lava that go skittering over the floor. They splash against each other and slide over the shadows, and the shadows all wail and screech and try to get away. The little drops run up against each other, coiling like serpents, trying to come together, but the sunlight’s still merciless, golden. _All that’s good in the world is in that light,_ thinks Dean. _All that’s good and simple._

Corrosive, soothing, the light spills on.

Dean’s got a hand on Sam’s shoulder and his head tucked under Dean’s chin. He’s still short enough for Dean to be able to do that, just barely. Sam has his eyes closed against the light, screwed tight, but he keeps asking: “Is it over? Dean?”

Dean’s watching the shadows. They grow strange and drip ink. The last of the sparks dim and die out on the floor but the shadows keep writhing, changing. Little green moths break out of the darkness and flutter dazedly around the church. A tiny brown puppy shoots out of nowhere and shocks Dean enough that he lets out a half-shout.

Sam jerks in his grasp. “ _What?_ Dean, what’s going on?”

“It’s just—it’s a bit hard to explain.”

From far away, there’s a sound like a siren heading down the road.

“Locals have probably heard all the banging and slamming,” Sam mumbles.

A very fat goat ambles out of the shadows and Dean sputters.

“There,” he says. “If that ain’t the making of a new unsolved urban mystery, I don’t know what is.” [  
](http://indiachick.livejournal.com/18180.html)

 

 

 

 

**EPILOGUE**

“Whew, we’re lucky it’s a hot day. This early, this hot. What’re the odds?”

The sky is a white-out, the day like the world’s never heard of fall or winter, as if stuck perpetually in sticky, hot summer. Down by the lake, Sam feels oven-baked. He watches the reflection of the power plant on the water, a wavering twin of the one across the lake, and maybe this one is engineered by lily pads and the tiny insects rowing on little leaves over the water.

He leans a bit closer to the water and watches himself: floppy overgrown hair and long nose and normal, hazel eyes. Dean murders Sam’s reflection with a stone. Silly Dean.

Earlier, they’d hidden out by the trees and watched two baffled policemen deal with eleven extremely disoriented men and women who’d been missing for days. The twelfth man, in his own stubborn way, had seemed the most well-balanced of the lot, rolling his eyes at the suggestions of monsters and altars and the supernatural, effortlessly blaming weird psychedelic drugs and bushwhackers, demanding that the investigation be carried out elsewhere so that “I can find my boys, and get a drink maybe, and we all don’t die of sunstroke right after our horrible ordeal. You understand, right, officers?”

 _Good ol’ Dad,_ muttered Dean. Sam thought he’d probably break his face from smiling so much.

They’re waiting for him to come back to the site now, as is only obvious he will after he checks at the motel. He’ll expect them to be waiting too. Honestly, Sam can’t wait.

Sam says, “I wonder what the story’s gonna be.”

“Aliens did it.”

Sam snorts. “Seriously?”

“Well, of course. No one’s gonna buy Dad’s theory except the cops, but that’s only because they’re _cops._ Twelve missing people, three dogs, one goat, several birds and a _cow._ All turning up at the same place, the people babbling incoherent about being the reserve pool for a six-winged monster. Aliens, I tell you. It’s _bulletproof_. Those UFO maniacs gonna go nuclear when they hear.”

“Dean. We’ve worse problems.”

Dean, stretched out on the ground and tracing the movement of a funny green bug with his eyes, only acknowledges this with a small questioning curl of his mouth.

“I don’t wanna hear them. I just want to lie here, rolling in the fact that we don’t have a giant demanding dog anymore. And that I can look at your stupid face without freaking out, Rabbit Eyes.”

“Amen,” mumbles Sam, throwing a stone, impressed at himself when it skips five, six times over the water.

Dean throws a hand over his brow, peering at Sam from under. Netted light filters through the leaves above them and makes tiny starbursts on his skin.

“That was fucking awesome timing, Sammy. With the sunlight. Where d’you come up with that idea?”

“What idea?”

Dean sits up, shaking his head to dislodge a few leaves. “Sunlight, you freak. It hates the sunlight.”

Sam frowns. “I was only just looking for you.”

Dean’s smile grows wider. He’s too bright to look at or something, and so Sam looks at the sky instead, a wild feeling in his blood. There might be clouds up there; it’s hard to tell. Sam wouldn’t admit to that loosening he feels inside, the way his world seems to be falling into all the right slots again, and he would never admit it to Dean, naturally, but he could kiss him right now.

Or not. He doesn’t want to freak Dean out.

Dean wedges an arm under Sam’s chin and pulls Sam against him, grabbing him in a choking headlock.

“Ow, no, lemme go, Dean—you jerk—” complains Sam, pulling uselessly at Dean’s arm, only succeeding in making it worse.

“Well, we really showed it.” Dean says, thoughtfully, meaning the Monster.

Sam wrestles quietly with Dean for a few seconds before getting enough purchase to bite him.

“ _Dammit!_ ” squeals Dean, letting him go, his eyes all starry. “You and your fucking teeth, Sam, really. What are you, a dinosaur? Should just glue your mouth shut, see how you like that.”

Sam grins wide, snapping his teeth together.

Sometimes it feels like every bit of him is haunted, by a thousand dead monsters, a thousand towns left behind, friends and teachers flitting by so fast that they could be nothing more than the smeared blurs of light seen through the Impala’s windows at night. It’s a nagging feeling, and sometimes he catches himself thinking of ways to cut that loose, cut himself loose. Maybe making those choices are not far away. But whatever they may be, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over how happy he is to just keep what he has.

Dean grows serious, though. He frowns and then flops back down on the ground, and Sam flops next to him, on his stomach, propping himself up on his elbows.

“What?”

“Let’s just never do this again. I mean, I don’t wanna do the part of the plan where I let something chase you ever again.”

Sam shrugs. “It kinda worked.”

“Yeah, Captain Obvious. So?”

Sam curls up, watching Dean’s profile as he hugs his knees and smiles sideways into the earth. The scent of grass and dirt and leaves fills his nose, and also Dean just inches away: sweat and blood and something very _Dean_. Beneath him, the ground feels like it’s sending up feelers, enamoured at how alive Sam feels.

“What’re we gonna tell Dad?”

“About what?”

“About the _car.”_

Dean thinks for a second. “Damn.” he says. “Aliens?”

Sam closes his eyes. Beneath the trees and the chirping birds, beneath the slight whistling of their breaths and the small sounds Dean makes as he tries to settle into a more comfortable position, beneath even the thrum of his blood—it’s like there’s another song.

Winding through the earth, through the sky, through everything. Something like content.

It’s the loudest when Dean turns around with a muffled snort and starts messing with Sam, poking and prodding in that annoying way he has whenever he can’t sleep and won’t let Sam.

Sam closes his eyes and just listens.

**THE END**

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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